“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(By his own definition Seth is no longer a physical being, although he’s told us he’s lived a number of previous lives; thus, ideas of reincarnation enter into his material. Mass Events is the sixth¹ book that Seth has produced — all of them with Jane’s active cooperation, obviously, as well as my own, since I write down his material verbatim, then add my own notes. Often Jane has little memory of the information she delivers as, or for, Seth. She began speaking for him in December 1963, and shows no signs of slackening her output. At times her Seth voice can be very powerful indeed, with an accent I have yet to succeed in describing. When she’s really into her trance state, her blue-gray eyes become much darker, much more luminous and penetrating. Seth calls Jane “Ruburt” and me “Joseph.” According to him, these “entity names” mean only that in our present lives we identify more with the male aspects of our entities, or whole selves — which in themselves are neither male or female, but contain within them a number of other selves [of both sexes] to whom we’re related, or a part of, reincarnationally and otherwise.

(I also think that Seth himself could have some pretty funny things to say here to Jane and me — some day I’ll ask him — words with which he’d humorously caution us not to take the whole affair too seriously, to leave room in our daily lives for the simple, uninhibited joy of creative expression and living even while we study his unending outpouring of material. But maintaining such a balance isn’t always easy. Seth has already offered Jane encouragement twice since he finished his part of the work for Mass Events in August 1979. He came through with the following quotations when Jane began to express a renewed concern about her responsibility for his material, and for the reactions of others to it. Her feelings had arisen in large part because of the ever-increasing mail response the Seth books have generated. Interesting, then, the way the Seth portion of Jane’s personality structure [whatever Seth’s reality may be] reinforces those other portions that are meeting all of the challenges embodied in her current mental and physical existence — and we are continually seeking to learn more about how Seth is able to do this. In these excerpts Seth also touches upon certain other points that we think of often.

(“Think of yourselves, in important ways, as almost having been born in 1963 [when these sessions began]. The two of you — for you are both involved — have not only initiated a new framework from which you and others can view the nature of reality more clearly, but you also had to start from scratch, so to speak, to get the material, learn to trust it, and then to apply it to your own lives — even while ‘the facts were not all in yet.’ At no point did you have all of the material to draw upon, as for example, your readers do at any given point. So tell Ruburt not to judge himself too harshly, and in all of this have him try to remember his sense of play….”

(It wasn’t until I was checking the page [or printer’s] proofs for Volume 1 last week that I realized Seth hadn’t followed through on his promise. I’d also forgotten to remind him to do so. I asked Jane if Seth could devote the next session to that subject matter so that I could insert it in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality as a note or an appendix, since I had plenty of work to do yet for that second volume. She agreed; we thought some very interesting material would result. We also thought it was a good time to pose questions for Seth — for just two weeks ago, in the 800th session, he’d finished dictating his own fifth book, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression.²

(Our young tiger cat, Billy, had been sleeping on a nearby chair. Now he woke up, stretched, jumped down and walked over to Jane as she spoke for Seth. Billy crouched to jump up into her lap. I picked him up and headed for the cellar door. Jane remained in trance.)

(“Yes,” I said to Seth over my shoulder. In a recent session Seth had remarked that Billy was “a sweet creature.” And he is. I put him in the cellar, where he sleeps each night.)

Give us a moment… Inner reality and private experience give birth to all mass events. Man cannot disentangle himself from the natural context of his physical life. His culture, his religion, his psychologies, and his psychological nature together form the context within which both private and mass events occur. (Loudly, then whispering so softly that I could barely hear:) This book will, then, be devoted to the nature of the great sweeping emotional, religious, or biological events that often seem to engulf the individual, or to lift him or her willy-nilly in their power.

(Jane had started doing some typing on the final manuscript for Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression a couple of days ago. She was also working on her own The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James. Yet I thought she needed the stimulus of Seth having something underway. There was more than a little irony in the situation, for I was the one who’d told her flat out, back in July 1975, that she was going to start Psyche, just so that she’d have a Seth book to play with. [I’d also wanted to see what she and Seth would come up with on demand.] But this time Seth fooled me and started Mass Events only a couple of weeks after finishing Psyche. I was all for it, though, I told Jane enthusiastically. It’s always a pleasure to work on a Seth book, to explore with him his unique view of reality, and to try to put at least a few of his ideas to use in our everyday, “practical” world. I repeated my thought that it didn’t matter how many Seth books she piled up ahead of contract, or publication: That was certainly a more creative and exciting position to be in than if one didn’t have anything ahead. Jane agreed, while still worrying about what we were going to do with all of the material as it accumulated year after year. At this time there’s no way we’re going to see it all published.

Such a mother would attract a consciousness who desired, perhaps, to reexperience childhood but not adulthood, or who might teach the mother lessons sorely needed. Such a child might naturally die at 10 or 12, or earlier. Yet the ministrations of science might keep the child alive far longer, until such a person [begins] encountering an adulthood thrust upon him or her, so to speak.

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.

If I catch anything amiss in Seth’s delivery I’ll ask him about it. He may omit a word, or I may misinterpret what he says while I’m concentrating on my notetaking. In these cases Jane always spots the error at once when she reads my typed session transcript. But except for such minor alterations, or in the case of personal information, which we may delete, Seth’s material is presented as received, and we never arbitrarily eliminate any of it — occasionally to the pain of others, I’m afraid. We think it important that these sessions be given just as Jane delivers them, for after all the manner of that presentation, and its organization, are vital parts of the whole Seth phenomenon. So is the speed of delivery, for that matter. I want to remind the reader that the Seth books are spoken books rather than written ones, and that ordinarily Seth has no chance to revise his copy.