“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I’ll preface the workaday notes for the first session of Mass Events with the following comments, just to briefly summarize the lifetime endeavor that my wife, Jane Roberts, and I are involved in with the Seth books. Seth is a highly creative “energy personality essence,” as he calls himself, who speaks through Jane while she’s in a trance or dissociated state. These notes, then, are written shortly after Seth finished dictating Mass Events in August 1979. I’ve discussed some of the same points while introducing earlier books in the series, of course, although on each occasion I did so in a different way for variety’s sake. At the same time, Jane and I want each book to be complete in itself, so that the “new” reader can begin to understand what’s happening from the very beginning. Details about some of the subjects I’ll mention here can emerge as this book proceeds, or others are referred to. And these notes will also free Jane to deal with other matters in her Introduction for Mass Events.

Note that even though Seth finished dictating Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality almost three years ago (in June 1974), and I completed my own notes and appendixes for it six months ago, we’re just now coming to the end of the long, complicated process involved in following the manuscript through the editorial and production stages necessary to get the book out into the marketplace. Checking the page proofs is the last stage we go through before publication, and Volume 1 is due to be marketed this summer — probably in July.

Beginning in June 1974, then, while writing notes and appendixes for Volume 1 of “Unknown”, and taking Seth’s dictation for Volume 2, I spent eight months producing the art work for Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness and for her book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time; I finished all of those drawings in January 1975. In the meantime Jane completed Adventures in August 1974, and started Psychic Politics that October. In March 1975 we took time out to move from the apartment house in downtown Elmira to our “hill house” just outside the city. Jane finished dictating Volume 2 of “Unknown” for Seth in April 1975, and I started my notes and appendixes for it. In July 1975 Seth began The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, and in December of that year Jane initiated work on her own The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation. She finished Politics in February 1976, and Cézanne in September; Politics was published that September also. I completed my own writing for Volume 1 of “Unknown” in October. Our 16-year-old cat, Willy, died early in November, and two days later we obtained a kitten, Willy Two (or Billy, as we soon came to call him), from an area humane society. I finished typing the manuscript for Volume 1 late in November, spent December checking it, and mailed it to Prentice-Hall early in January 1977.