“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.)

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.

Give us a moment… Physicians, of course, are also constantly at the beck and call of many people who will take no responsibility at all for their own well-being, who will plead for operations they do not need. The physician is also visited by people who do not want to get well, and use the doctor and his methods as justification for further illness, saying: “The doctor is no good,” or “The medicine will not work,” therefore blaming the doctor for a way of life they have no intention of changing.

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.

Sometimes the artist in me visually comes to the aid of the writer by laying out pages of material and notes side by side upon a table or two. Then I can see what I’m trying to do as a whole, and half intuitively, half intellectually make decisions about how to organize passages I may be having problems with. This process is always very challenging and thrilling to me. It always seems to work, although progress may still be slow at times. This method also helps greatly in counteracting that initial impatience the artist part of me strongly feels when my writer self comes upon a complex situation.

“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.”

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.