“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(With one exception, which I’ll get to later, we’ve spent another long period — 9 weeks — without holding book sessions. Seth-Jane was certainly busy on all of those Monday and Saturday nights, though, and came through with another separate series of sessions after I inserted the 806th session into Mass Events — 17 of them this time, as compared to the 10 sessions delivered before the 806th was held. Once again, these were private or nonbook sessions, and once again they covered a wide range of subjects other than personal ones.

(Including the 806th session, those two blocks of material mean that in the last 20 weeks [or 4½ months], Seth has held but one session for Mass Events, and 28 on other subjects. “Maybe he’s already finished the book, and forgot to tell us,” I joked with Jane. “Maybe it’s going to be his shortest one yet.”

(“That constant book stuff can get confining, though,” she said, then reminded me that Seth — with her obvious consent — had plunged into Mass Events only a couple of weeks after finishing Psyche. “It gets so he concentrates on book subjects so much that a lot of other things are left out…. At least breaks in dictation give us chances to go off in other directions — the sessions are more flexible that way.”

(This flexibility also generates some challenges, however, for the great amount of material we’ve accumulated during the Mass Events hiatus gave us the urge to see what we could do about getting at least some of it published, so that others could benefit. The problem — the challenge — would be to find the physical time to do the necessary editing and notes to put such a manuscript in shape for publication; this would be a job that could easily take a year. Jane and I considered combining that hypothetical book with Mass Events, but figured out that the resulting volume would almost surely be too long; longer even than Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, which in our opinion is bulky enough.

(The two sets of material are also different in certain subtle ways, although one can always justifiably say that each subject Seth discusses is in some fashion a part of his overall philosophy. It would have to be that way, of course. In other words, it’s somewhat ironic that during the break in dictating Mass Events Seth-Jane actually produced the equivalent of another book, but one that we can’t do much about, at least at this time.¹

(Then, in a private session held on the evening of September 17, 1977, Seth came through with a very exciting concept called “Framework 1 and Framework 2.” Jane and I were so struck by the practical, far-reaching implications of this proposition that we began a concerted effort to put it to use in daily life. Briefly and very simply, Seth maintains that Framework 2, or inner reality, contains the creative source from which we form all events, and that by the proper focusing of attention we can draw from that vast subjective medium everything we need for a constructive, positive life in Framework 1, or physical reality. We’ve already made known to Seth our desires that he go into his Frameworks 1 and 2 material much more extensively in Mass Events, since those concepts are so closely involved with the individual and collective experiences surrounding the lives of everyone.³

(Now for the “one exception” I referred to at the beginning of this note. It’s the 812th session for October 1, and at least some of it is book dictation. It was triggered by a visit we had recently from a reader who obviously had strong tendencies toward paranoia. Seth gave a session on paranoia in response to that encounter [but not for the individual concerned, although Jane later wrote to him], then instructed us to lay the session aside for inclusion in a later chapter of Mass Events.

(Finally: Just before tonight’s session Jane said she thought Seth might do some work on Mass Events. She had a question about herself, and I asked for a few lines from Seth on whether she just might have been born left-handed. I want to use the material in connection with a passage I’m putting together for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. [See the excerpts from Session 211, in Appendix 18 of that work.] However, Seth didn’t answer my question.)

Dictation: One of man’s strongest attributes is religious feeling. It is the part of psychology most often overlooked. There is a natural religious knowledge with which you are born. Ruburt’s book The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James explains that feeling very well. It is a biological spirituality translated into verbal terms. It says: “Life is a gift (and not a curse). I am a unique, worthy creature in the natural world, which everywhere surrounds me, gives me sustenance, and reminds me of the greater source from which I myself and the world both emerge. My body is delightfully suited to its environment, and comes to me, again, from that unknown source which shows itself through all of the events of the physical world.”