“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This is the first session for Mass Events since the last one, obviously — but with an 11-week gap between the two. How come? What were Jane and I doing all of that “time” — that nearly one-quarter of a year of our physical lives?

(First, after holding session 805 we took a six-week break from sessions of any kind. We didn’t plan to do this; it just developed, and we eventually realized that it did so through Jane’s simple need for a change in routine. We had plenty of other things to do: I was still occupied daily with writing notes and appendixes for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality; on June 4 Jane received the page proofs for Cézanne, and began correcting them for the printer; on the 14th of the month “our” contractor began converting half of our garage into a writing room for Jane, and adding a large back porch [see the end of Note 2 for Session 801]. All of that building activity was much noisier and more disruptive than the work had been for the front porch, and forced some changes in our schedules, including more night work, as we manipulated around those distractions.

(On July 9 we received from Prentice-Hall our first press copies of Volume 1 of “Unknown.” This made us feel good indeed, for it signaled the first publication of a Seth book in three years [since Personal Reality came out in 1974]. In mid-July our friend Sue Watkins¹ began typing the rest of the final manuscript for Psyche; Jane had managed to help me out by finding the time to prepare the first five chapters for the publisher, but since we were both so busy we asked Sue for assistance. [Sue is a writer also, and knows about things like manuscripts.] Then by the time this 806th session came about, Jane estimated that she was practically through with the first handwritten draft of James. She’s also started her Introduction for it.

(Going back to the end of our stay-at-home vacation, on June 25 Seth-Jane began delivering a series of 10 sessions that we held on Monday and Saturday evenings for a change, instead of following our usual Monday-Wednesday routine. We finally decided to classify these sessions as private, or at least as not being work for Mass Events. Some of that material is intensely personal, and some only generally so. But a lot of it isn’t intimate at all — meaning that it could help others if it were published. This realization brought up questions we’ve encountered before: Which sessions apply to a particular project, and which ones don’t? What if they’re related in oblique ways, yet Seth doesn’t call them book dictation? I may not realize I should ask him about this at the time, or only later begin to speculate about using certain material. We know that Seth will specify a given number of sessions for this book, for instance, yet we keep the freedom to consider adding other material.

(This 806th session is such an example. Strictly speaking, it isn’t dictation for Mass Events, but Jane and I are presenting portions of it here because Seth discussed events and memory with a different emphasis, and touched upon aspects of reincarnation² — all subjects that spring out of that ineffable, really undefinable quality he calls simultaneous time. I ask the reader to always keep in mind that no matter what subject he’s discussing, or from what viewpoint, Seth’s kind of “time” underlies all that our present physical senses translate into linear, concrete experience and history. For clarification, I also keep this in mind: Seth isn’t physical, as he defines himself, and that “energy personality essence” seemingly isn’t all that focused on the passage of time — as we are — yet way back in the 14th session for January 8, 1964, he told us that time “is therefore still a reality of some kind to me.” In these notes for Mass Events, I plan to refer to time — all kinds of it — from “time to time.”)

Such a technique is highly valuable. Not only are memories not “dead,” they are themselves ever-changing. Many alter themselves almost completely without your notice. In his (unpublished) apprentice novels, Ruburt (Jane) did two or three versions of an episode with a priest he had known in his youth. Each version at the time he wrote it represented his honest memory of the event. While the bare facts were more or less the same, the entire meaning and interpretation of each version differed so drastically that those differences far outweighed the similarities.

(11:05. Now Seth went into the more personal Part 2 of the session, explaining how in her own case Jane could give her past self in this life her current knowledge, so that through the resulting “psychological synthesis” she would be better equipped to handle certain challenges.

1. Sue Watkins has been mentioned, and at times quoted, in a number of Jane’s books: The Seth Material, Seth Speaks, Adventures in Consciousness, Psychic Politics, and both volumes of “Unknown” Reality. Jane started her ESP class in September 1967. We met Sue in September 1968; she began attending class a month later, and did so more or less regularly until the end of class in February 1975. At this time Sue is working on a novel of her own and co-editing a weekly newspaper in a small town some 50 miles north of Elmira, New York (where Jane and I live).

2. Jane spent considerable time before my birthday (I turned 58 on June 20) preparing a sketch book of poems and colored drawings as a present for me. She touched upon many subjects in her highly original poetry and art. On reincarnation she wrote: