“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.”

(Since the 806th session was held 10 weeks ago [on July 30], then, I’ve worked steadily on Volume 2 of “Unknown.” Late in August Jane interrupted her work on James to move all of her writing paraphernalia into her new room at the back of the house. Sue Watkins delivered the finished manuscript for several chapters of Psyche, and picked up more to type. Jane, who was to work on James all through September, prepared a presentation for that book so that in the meantime her editor, Tam Mossman, could show it to his associates at Prentice-Hall. On September 12, Jane had a very vivid dream that she believes was rooted in a past life of hers in Turkey: Her dream involved a little boy, Prince Emir, who lived in a brand-new world in which death hadn’t been invented yet. Over the telephone three days later, Tam suggested that Jane do a children’s book, or one for “readers of all ages,” based on her dream about Emir;² the next day he called again, this time to give her the delightful news that he’d accepted James for publication.

(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

In order from the beginning — the passages on paranoia (in the 812th session) will come later. While Ruburt was working at one of his books a few days ago, he heard a public service announcement. The official told all listeners that the flu season had officially begun. He sternly suggested that the elderly and those with certain diseases make appointments at once for flu shots.

The physician is also a private person, so I speak of him only in his professional capacity, for he usually does the best he can in the belief system that he shares with his fellows. Those beliefs do not exist alone, but are of course intertwined with religious and scientific ones, as separate as they might appear. Christianity has conventionally treated illness as the punishment of God, or as a trial sent by God, to be borne stoically. It has considered man a sinful creature, flawed by original sin, forced to work by the sweat of his brow.

As I sorted through the mass of material Seth-Jane has produced these last weeks, I found myself once again charmed and mystified by the challenges contained in the art of writing. The painted image can be taken in at a glance, at any stage of its development, but the cognition of the written word takes much more time, no matter how fast one reads or absorbs new material. With a single look the artist has an immediate grasp of the entire work before him; he (or she) can tell what he’s done and has to do, what he may have to change or “fix up,” even if he fails at it. Not so the writer, who while reading must pass up the artist’s simultaneous perception for his own linear cognition as he makes a multitude of decisions involving sentence structure, what to use or eliminate, and so forth.

“But Seth apparently just delivers his material verbally, and that’s it,” Jane wrote after reading my first draft of this note. “Even in a long book, he doesn’t go through any of those cognitive processes Rob mentions. I do when I’m writing, editing, or rewriting my own work. If I do any of that work as Seth, it’s so unconscious and fast that I’m not aware of it. And Seth’s ‘writing’ needs hardly any changes.”

3. I should also note that Seth has made one short, rather mysterious reference to the existence of Frameworks 3 and 4. Two days after he’d first talked about his concept of Frameworks 1 and 2, he came through with the following statement in another private session. Jane and I have yet to ask him to elaborate upon it: “There is, incidentally, a Framework 3 and a Framework 4, in the terms of our discussion — but all such labels are, again, only for the sake of explanation. The realities are merged.”