PART ONE

(At the same time, Jane and I are extremely grateful that we have the opportunity to study ideas about consciousness with Seth, and this opening up of our individual realities is something we couldn’t have conceived of before 1963. Our appreciation of life has expanded greatly — and if the Seth material did nothing but help us grow in that respect, it would perform a very valuable service. We hope others feel they’ve gained something from the material too. [Actually, I think that what I’ve learned has saved me from bitterness and disillusionment in later life. Jane has also been helped a great deal.] So our aim with the Seth books is to let Seth have his say, to add some thoughts of our own, and to trust that the feelings and meanings in all of this will evoke beneficial responses in each reader. It’s all we can do. I for one think that my own words are pretty inadequate tools of expression to convey the deeper, unspoken meanings within life that I sense but cannot really verbalize.

(One might say that Mass Events had its origins two Seth books ago — way back in Volume I of “Unknown” Reality, which Seth finished dictating in June 1974. At 10:14 in the 697th session for that work, he made this statement: “I will have more to say concerning illnesses, epidemics, and mass disorders in this book.”

(Pause at 9:57, one of many.) I said there are no closed systems. This also means that in world terms, events spin like electrons, affecting all psychological and psychic systems as well as biological ones. It is true to say that each individual dies alone, for no one else can die that death. It is also true that part of the species dies with each death, and is reborn with each birth, and that each private death takes place within the greater context of the existence of the entire species. The death serves a purpose species-wise while it also serves the purposes of the individual, for no death comes unbidden.

(10:19.) Now, no person becomes ill unless that illness serves a psychic or psychological reason, so many people escape such complications. In the meantime, however, scientists and medical men find more and more viruses against which the population “must” be inoculated. Each one is considered singly. There is a rush to develop a new inoculation against the newest virus. Much of this is on a predictive basis: The scientists “predict” how many people might be “attacked” by, say, a virus that has caused a given number of deaths. Then as a preventative measure the populace is invited to the new inoculation.

(“Oh, I don’t believe it,” she said. “This isn’t anything like I consciously figured upon — and you can put that down for one of us to type, two or three years from now…. I can’t get over this….”

(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.

(“My mind works in sneaky little ways,” she said. “I don’t tell you everything. I was thinking of something like a question-and-answer format for a book, if we did a new one.” Even that idea was a revelation to me, since she hadn’t mentioned a book, period. Seth returned briefly as we talked:

(Long pause, one of many.) I will have more to say about suicide, but I do not mean here to imply guilt on the part of a person who takes his or her own life. In many such cases, a more natural death would have ensued in any event as the result of “diseases.” Period. Often, for example, a person wanting to die originally intended to experience only a portion of earth life, say childhood. This purpose would be entwined with the parents’ intent. Such a son or daughter might be born, for instance, through a woman who wanted to experience childbirth but who did not necessarily want to encounter the years of child-raising, for her own reasons.

2. I don’t mean to confuse the reader by using the titles of Seth’s “old” books, but rather to show how Jane’s and my work encompasses a number of projects at once. That is, we have yet to manage to work on just one book of any kind at a time; that would be too simple! There’s always a long slow rate of turnover in our labors, it seems: As one book or project is finished, another rises almost effortlessly to take its place, and everything rolls along together until the next large change comes about.

In physical terms, three years is an important portion of one’s life span. What were Jane and I each doing all that time? We were involved in a whole group of endeavors. I’ll recap the major ones in order to place the beginning of Seth’s latest book, Mass Events, in context. I do this for my own sake as well as the reader’s, since I like to know exactly where I am in time, and what I mean and feel when writing even a short note for one of the Seth books.

This reconstruction of the past can be both fascinating and frustrating as I compare dates, session numbers, and our daily activities. Somehow, immersed in all of that minutiae of the past, I revive it so that it becomes part of the present once more — and that coexistence then reminds me of Seth’s idea of simultaneous time; perhaps, outside of dreaming, it’s the best approximation I can make of the paradoxical notion that all exists at once, and that all changes together, for each time I regard one of my past moments from the present, I change both that past and the present.

In January we obtained an unlisted telephone number, because we could no longer handle the 600-or-so calls a month that were coming in. Later in the month, Jane started writing James. In February 1977 we received from Prentice-Hall the copyedited manuscript for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality. (Copyediting is one of the earlier editorial stages a book goes through on its way to publication, and is meant to study all of the work that Jane and I and her editor, Tam Mossman, have already done on the manuscript: Before it’s set into type, a reader who works independently of the publishing firm carefully checks the manuscript for grammar, contradictions, facts, consistency, and so forth, and makes suggestions for whatever changes he or she thinks are desirable. Jane and I are free, of course, to reject any alterations we don’t agree with.) In March we checked the copyedited manuscript for Cézanne. Seth finished dictating Psyche early in April. A few days later we began correcting page proofs for Volume 1 of “Unknown.”

At this time, I’m still working on the notes and appendixes for Volume 2 of “Unknown,” even while Seth has begun Mass Events. Jane and I have already planned our approach to Psyche (which Seth has just finished), and it’s to be published shortly after Volume 2 is. To top off our activities of the moment, we’re having the front porch of the hill house rebuilt — with a new raised floor and screening all around, so that Jane can write there in the summertime. The workmen swarming around all day, and the noise involved, are both exciting and distracting. But I have a feeling that the front porch affair isn’t the end of our construction odyssey: Jane has a certain speculative look when she notes that we have but one car — she doesn’t drive — to occupy the large two-car garage attached to the rear of the house. What better idea than to convert half of the garage into a writing room, with sliding glass doors, and add a screened-in porch there also? After all, she commented recently, the porch would protect our back door, too, especially from all of that winter weather….

3. Seth’s delivery is remarkably clear and unambiguous, but once in a while he’ll come through with an awkward sentence (as we all do), or one that combines the singular and the plural when one or the other should be used throughout, or he’ll repeat a certain word too often. On such occasions Jane and I may recast the sentence slightly while maintaining the syntax, or add a clarifying word or phrase in brackets [like this].

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.

As for myself, I took both preventative “treatments” before Jane began speaking for Seth in 1963. One led to a strong serum reaction that incapacitated me for two weeks; the other resulted in a partial paralysis lasting several days. I accepted the vaccines because I yielded (if somewhat reluctantly) to conventional parental and medical pressures, as well as my own beliefs of the time: I was “supposed” to take the inoculations; they would be “good” for me. Even now I must carry a warning card in my wallet. It bears a description of my reactions to at least some vaccines, as well as the most emphatic statement that if I’m found unconscious for any reason — after an accident, say — I must not be given an injection of any kind because I might have a fatal reaction to it. I haven’t had a “shot” since living through those very unpleasant experiences, nor do I intend to. I no longer believe I’d succumb to one of the forbidden vaccines — but at the same time I don’t want to find out what might happen, either!