“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Early in September—magically appearing as though from another reality, for we’d quite forgotten about the situation—we received through Prentice-Hall six copies of the reprinted Dutch-language edition of Seth Speaks. This time the publisher in the Netherlands, Ankh-Hermes, had not cut Seth Spreekt.⁷

Right after that Sue Watkins called from her home in upstate New York to tell us that she’d just received from Prentice-Hall her first printed copy of Volume 2 of Conversations With Seth. She’s to send us an autographed copy after more reach her. Both Jane and I congratulated her on producing a fine pair of books. Even though we could hardly be called impartial, we knew that in her long account of much that had taken place in Jane’s ESP classes, Sue had produced superior work both for herself and for us, through her viewpoint offering new dimensions and insights concerning what all three of us—four, counting Seth!—had been, and still are, trying to do. Our copy of Conversations did arrive from Sue early in October. Seeing it cheered Jane—yet my wife continued to hassle [as she put it] her efforts on Magical Approach, asking herself again and again whether she really wanted to do that book. Her intuitions always affirmed that she did. It was often difficult going for her, though: Magical Approach still wasn’t flowing the way she wanted it to.

Early this morning we heard strange scratching sounds on the other side of the closed fireplace damper. These soon became intermixed with a series of musical chitterings and chatterings. A bird, or birds? We didn’t think so. Next we speculated about squirrels, since there are plenty of them living in the woods out back—yet the sounds didn’t seem quite right for one or more of those creatures, either. The noises stopped after an hour or so.

People want, then, to throw aside old structures of belief. They yearn, often without recognizing it, for the remembered knowledge of early childhood, when it seems that they experienced for a time a dimension of experience in which the unexpected was taken for granted, when “magical events” occurred quite naturally. They begin to look at the structure of their lives in a different fashion that attempts to evoke from nature, and from their own natures, some graceful effortlessness, some freedom nearly forgotten. They begin to turn toward a more natural and a more magical approach to their own lives. At such times the conserving elements in nature and in society itself do not seem as strong as they did before. Surprising events that were earlier covered up or ignored seem to appear with greater frequency, and everywhere a new sense of quickness and acceleration gradually alters the expectations of people in regard to the events of their own lives, and to the behavior they expect from others. You are in such times now.

(Note: All of the photographs of Jane that appear in The Seth Material were taken in the living room of Apartment 4 early in 1970; glimpses of the room appear in those shots. The first and last photos show Jane before the bay window that faces the northwest, with the trees and the backs of the houses lining the east side of Walnut Street in view.)