“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.”

(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

(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

(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.)

(Now Seth delivered a few paragraphs for Jane and me, then ended the session at 12:22 A.M.)

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.”

2. I’ll remind the reader that Jane has already received inspiration and material for two books from her amazingly creative dream state: her novel, The Education of Oversoul Seven, and James. While dreaming she tuned into whole chapters of Seven, for instance.

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.”

4. Seth referred to the paralyzing Guillain-Barre syndrome, which struck a tiny proportion of those receiving shots in the 1976 swine flu program in this country. For many reasons, the federal government suddenly ended the very expensive and controversial program last December. Then in May of this year a number of scientists, working both in and outside of government, agreed that the flu shots triggered the Guillain-Barre syndrome, but that the reasons for such reactions in certain individuals are unknown. Jane and I didn’t take the shots.