“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:)

(With some humor:) Ruburt and Joseph have recently purchased a color television set, so now their television world is no longer in black and white. I have used television as an analogy at various times, and I would like to do so again, to show the ways in which physical events are formed, and to try to describe the many methods used by individuals in choosing those particular events that will be personally encountered.

You switch from channel to channel with predictable results. The programming for Channel 9, for example, does not suddenly intrude on Channel 6. Even the actors themselves, taking part in such sagas, have but the remotest idea of events that are involved in order that their own images will appear on your television screen. Their jobs are to act, taking it for granted that the technicians are following through.

There is no need in my outlining in detail the multitudinous events that must occur so that you can watch your favorite program. You flip the switch and there it is, while all of that background work is unknown to you. You take it for granted. Your job is simply to choose the programs of your choice on any evening. Many others are watching the same programs, of course, yet each person will react quite individually.

(9:40.) Now for a moment let us imagine that physical events occur in the same fashion — that you choose those which flash upon the screen of your experience. You are quite familiar with the events of your own life, for you are of course your own main hero or heroine, villain or victim, or whatever. As you do not know what happens in the television studio before you observe a program, however, so you do not know what happens in the creative framework of reality before you experience physical events. We will call that vast “unconscious” mental and universal studio Framework 2.

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.

The inner mechanisms that happen prior to your experience will take place in the vast mental studio of Framework 2. There, all the details will be arranged, the seemingly chance encounters, for example, the unexplained coincidences that might have to occur before a given physical event takes place.

Actors visit casting agencies so that they know what plays need their services. In your dreams you visit “casting agencies.” You are aware of the various plays being considered for physical production. In the dream state, then, often you familiarize yourself with dramas that are of a probable nature. If enough interest is shown, if enough actors apply, if enough resources are accumulated, the play will go on. When you are in other than your normally conscious state, you visit that creative inner agency in which all physical productions must have their beginning. You meet with others, who for their own reasons are interested in the same kind of drama. Following our analogy, the technicians, the actors, the writers all assemble — only in this case the result will be a live event rather than a televised one. There are disaster films being planned, educational programs, religious dramas. All of these will be encountered in full-blown physical reality.

Such events occur as a result of individual beliefs, desires, and intents. There is no such thing as a chance encounter. No death occurs by chance, nor any birth. In the creative atmosphere of Framework 2, intents are known. In a manner of speaking, no act is private. Your communication systems bring to your living room notices of events that occur throughout the world. Yet that larger inner system of communications is far more powerful in scope, and each mental act is imprinted in the multidimensional screen of Framework 2. That screen is available to all, and in other levels of consciousness, particularly in the sleep and dreaming stages, the events of that inner reality are as ever-present and easily accessible as physical events are when you are awake.

You cannot gain what you want at someone else’s detriment, then. You cannot use Framework 2 to force an event upon another person. Certain prerequisites must be met, you see, before a desired end can become physically experienced.

1. The basic simultaneity of time is the most fascinating of all of Seth’s ideas, I think. That “spacious present” holds all events side by side, ready to be interpreted in cause-and-effect fashion by the organizational abilities of our more limited physical senses. I wrote about reconstructing the past, simultaneous time, and dreams early in Note 2 for Session 801. Also see the material on Seth and his simultaneous time in the opening notes for the 806th session.

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: