“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(All right. Another long period — 10 weeks this time — has passed following Seth’s last session for Mass Events. Since this is the third such break between book sessions, it seems that Jane and I would be used to the idea by now. Actually, I’m more bothered than she is by such long intervals. I like to follow an endeavor through from start to finish in a reasonably direct manner. When the sessions don’t work out that way I can feel somewhat uneasy, while realizing at the same time that a number of compensating factors may be at work. In this case two distinct notions, one factual and one philosophical, helped keep me at ease.

(First, during that 10-week break Seth-Jane held a series of 18 sessions — excellent ones — that once again did not constitute dictation for Mass Events. Second, if one keeps in mind Seth’s ideas about simultaneous time, that basically all happens at once [even considering Seth’s own acknowledgment that time “…is therefore still a reality of some kind to me”], then it hardly matters how long a break transpires between particular sessions; there is no real separation; dictation on any subject or project can be resumed whenever all involved — Jane, Seth, and myself — choose, and it will be as though the break never existed. For in trance, Jane will once again be in accord with Seth in that nearly “timeless” environment in which he has a large portion of his being.¹

(So we’ve decided to simply go along with however Mass Events works out in terms of length, whether that length involves time or the number of sessions. We do not plan to ask Seth when the book will be done. We have asked him to discuss his Framework 1 and 2 concepts for it, though, and he’s promised to do so; he’s had a good deal to say about those structures in the nonbook material Jane has delivered since the 814th session was held.

(We’re still holding the sessions on Monday and Saturday evenings, which is the routine we initiated after the 805th session was held just seven months ago [on May 16]. As we sat for tonight’s session Jane told me — somewhat to my surprise — that she felt Seth might give some material for Mass Events. She wasn’t positive, however. Today she’d reread his sessions for the book. Then:)

Dictation. I do not want to shock you, but dictation — continuation of our last chapter (2: “Mass Meditations,” etc.).

Not only does television actually serve as a mass means of communal meditation, but it also presents you with highly detailed, manufactured dreams, in which each viewer shares to some extent. We will use some distinctions here, and so I am going to introduce the terms “Framework 1” and “Framework 2,” to make my discussion clear.

In this book I will try to tell you what goes on behind the scenes — to show you the ways in which you choose your daily physical programs, and to describe how those personal choices mix and merge to form a mass reality. For now, we will go back to television again. You can turn off a program that offends you. You can choose to buy or not buy a product whose virtues are being praised. Television presents you with a mirror of your society. It reflects and rereflects through millions of homes the giant dreams and fears, the hopes and terrors of events in the most private individual.

Television interacts with your lives, but it does not cause your lives. It does not cause the events that it depicts. With your great belief in technology, it often seems to many people that television causes violence, for example, or that it causes a love of overmaterialism, or that it causes “loose morals.” Television reflects. In a manner of speaking it does not even distort, though it may reflect distortions. The writers and actors of television dramas are attuned to the “mass mind.” They are not leaders or followers. They are creative reflectors, acutely aware of the overall, generalized emotional and psychic patterns of the age.

3. Although this is the first session for Mass Events in which Seth had discussed Framework 1 and Framework 2, at the moment Jane and I are a good deal more familiar with his ideas concerning those fields of action than the reader is; see the opening notes for the last (814th) session. Since introducing them in the deleted, or nonbook session for September 17, Seth has at least mentioned the two frameworks in 17 of the 23 deleted sessions he’s given us since then.

My piece is naturally tailored to my own beliefs and needs, of course, and some of its implications may become clearer to readers as Seth continues with his framework material in Mass Events. But I’m presenting my effort as close as possible to its time of conception so that each interested person can keep it in mind, and eventually write his or her own version of it for personal use. Jane has done this; we find that a daily casual reading of our respective “credos” concerning Frameworks 1 and 2 is valuable indeed. I wrote on October 26: