“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?

(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.”)

You must remember the creativity and the open-ended nature of events, for even in one life a given memory is seldom a “true version” of a past event. The original happening is experienced from a different perspective on the part of each person involved, of course, so that the event’s implications and basic meanings may differ according to the focus of each participant. That given event, in your terms happening for the first time, say, begins to “work upon” the participants. Each one brings to it his or her own background, temperament, and literally a thousand different colorations — so that the event, while shared by others, is still primarily original to each person.

You are used to a time structure, so that you remember something that happened at a particular time in the past. Usually you can place events in that fashion. There are neurological pockets, so to speak, so that biologically the body can place events as it perceives activity. Those neurological pulses are geared to the biological world you know.

In those terms, past or future-life memories usually remain like ghost images by contrast. Overall, this is necessary so that immediate body response can be focused in the time period you recognize. Other life memories are carried along, so to speak, beneath those other pulses — never, in certain terms, coming to rest so that they can be examined, but forming, say, the undercurrents upon which the memories of your current life ride.

Often by purposefully trying to slow down your thought processes, or playfully trying to speed them up, you can become aware of memories from other lives — past or future. To some extent you allow other neurological impulses to make themselves known. There may often be a feeling of vagueness, because you have no ready-made scheme of time or place with which to structure such memories. Such exercises also involve you with the facts of the events of your own life, for you automatically are following probabilities from the point of your own focus.

In a quiet moment, off guard, you might remember an event from this life, but there may be a strange feeling to it, as if something about it, some sensation, does not fit into the time slot in which the event belongs. In such cases that [present-life] memory is often tinged by another, so that a future or past life memory sheds its cast upon the recalled event. There is a floating quality about one portion of the memory.

Dreams in which past and present are both involved are an example; also dreams in which the future and the past merge, and dreams in which time seems to be a changing ingredient.

Any such moment is therefore a gateway into all of your existence. The events that you recognize as happening now are simply specific and objective, but the most minute element in any given moment’s experience is also symbolic of other events and other times. Each moment is then like a mosaic, only in your current life history you follow but one color or pattern, and ignore the others. As I have mentioned [in other books], you can indeed change the present to some extent by purposefully altering a memory event. That kind of synthesis can be used in many instances with many people.

Such an exercise is not some theoretical, esoteric, impractical method, but a very precise, volatile, and dynamic way of helping the present self by calming the fears of a past self. That past self is not hypothetical, either, but still exists, capable of being reached and of changing its reactions. You do not need a time machine to alter the past or the future.

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.

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: