“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(We gave up our regularly scheduled sessions last week, and spent a great deal of time correcting the proofs for Volume 1 of “Unknown.”³ In fact, I didn’t finish my part of the job until midnight Sunday; then early this morning I mailed the whole thing to Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor at Prentice-Hall. By now both of us were bleary from all of those days and nights of concentrated labor, but still we wanted to hold the session. I sat opposite Jane in our quiet, softly-lit living room, working on these notes while I waited for her to take off her glasses and go easily into trance. I felt a familiar sense of anticipation as I thought of recording the excellent session to come. And that’s when Seth surprised us.)

Another purpose is involved in presenting Mass Events in context, though: I plan to use current professional and personal events from our lives as a sort of background or framework for the book as Jane delivers it for Seth. But right now, here’s a chronological list of our activities from June 17, 1974, when Seth finished his share of the work on Volume I of “Unknown Reality” to April 18, 1977 (today) when I mailed the corrected page proofs for that volume to Jane’s publisher.

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.

In addition to these activities, Jane conducted her weekly ESP classes until we moved in March 1975, and kept up with her considerable correspondence. Her mail is accumulating at such a rate that I think it’s becoming a valuable social document in its own right. An extremely interesting study could be done on the personal and social factors behind the great variety of responses her work has generated. We have on file most of the letters we’ve received over the years.