“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane hadn’t operated well yesterday.¹ She did tell me that she was somewhat surprised to realize Seth might be closer to completing his work on Dreams than she’d thought he was. My own idea has been that Seth is far from finishing the book.

Jane held Session 900 for Chapter 5 of Dreams, in Volume 1, some 20 months ago. In Note 1 for that session I described a most vivid dream experience—one in which, Seth told me in the session itself, I had viewed the many-faceted light of my own being and of the universe. Participating in that event had been our friend, Floyd Waterman. Floyd is an extremely generous and caring individual who has helped us many times over the years; he’s the contractor who converted half of our double garage for the hill house into Jane’s writing room.² Jane and I have each shared a number of psychic experiences with him.

The comical series of events involving Floyd, one of his sons, and another helper had started this noon: “Hell, Rob, it’s a coon!” a surprised Floyd called down to me from the roof of the house, after the beam from his flashlight had illuminated the black mask across the animal’s face and made its eyes shine as it crouched at the base of the fireplace chimney. The raccoon had evidently picked the site as a secure, heated refuge from the winter weather to come. The three men vainly tried several methods to coax the half-wild, half-tame creature back up the chimney. Finally Floyd opened the damper a bit and lit a sheet of newspaper in the fireplace: The smoke immediately sent our very upset tenant scrambling up the chimney, across the roof and into the hemlock tree growing at one corner of the front porch. Then while his two helpers stood guard to keep the raccoon in the tree, Floyd lugged a very heavy flat stone up the ladder and planted it across the chimney; he’s going to cement a wire mesh in place as a permanent seal against animals and birds.

I pushed Jane in her chair out on the porch, as close to the hemlock as we could get behind the floor-to-ceiling glass; we looked up at the chattering animal from only three feet away. We’d seen raccoons playing in the tree a few times, and Floyd, who lives on a farm, sees them often. This one was fully grown and bore a heavy coat of mixed black, brown, and gray hair; the colors exactly matched those of the tree trunk. In the gloomy day we couldn’t see eyes in the black face. We couldn’t tell the animal’s sex. [I read later that females and the young live in groups, the adult males usually alone—perfectly suitable accommodations of consciousness for raccoons!] “Coons can’t run fast,” Floyd told us, “and big dogs will attack ‘em if they catch them out in the open in the daytime. But that coon could kill even a big dog, if it got cornered.” He added that if we heard a loud thudding noise on the roof tonight, it meant that an animal had managed to dislodge the stone cap on the chimney. And Floyd had been right: The raccoon stayed in the tree until dusk, then descended and ambled into the woods in back of the house.³

(“Yes,” I told Seth. I was getting the rather odd impression that to some extent his material this evening would grow out of our experience with the raccoon, even if he didn’t mention it.)

Within the patterns of human experience, then, lies evidence of man’s greater ability: He rubs shoulders with his own deeper understanding whenever he remembers, say, a precognitive dream, an out-of-body—whenever he feels the intrusion or infusion of knowledge into his mind from other than physical sources. Such a creature could not be the puppet of a genetic engineering accidentally manufactured in a universe that was itself meaningless. Period.

“Wednesday, November 18, 1981. Right now I’m really blue, my eyes operating poorly; tears warmly close; yet enjoying the dark sky and street as rain threatens… the view of the mountains afforded by the windows; the rock music on the radio; the odd remaining odor of door varnish—deeply loving all of it yet swept through with something like nostalgia. The phone rings and at first I can’t tell if the ring is really here or from the radio, and when I answer the phone the voice is distant; it asks for Rob. A flash flood watch is in effect—nothing to worry us on our hill! I wait to feel better. Rob turned off the radio so he could hear on the phone…. He goes out front to feed the birds. I do feel relieved some, to be writing this down. It’s time for lunch; maybe I’ll do a few notes afterward….”