“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.

(As of now: I’m practically through with the appendixes for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality — which means I still have a number of notes to write for the book’s sessions per se, as well as much work to do for the Introductory Notes and the Epilogue. Soon after Tam Mossman suggested in early October that she do a book on her dream about Emir,² Jane began work on that project with her usual enthusiasm. The dream became Chapter 1 of the book, and inspired the rest of it; she’s having great fun writing the story, and is sending it to Tam chapter by chapter as it comes out of her typewriter — a procedure she’s never followed before. She doesn’t know how long Emir will be. Late in October she signed her contracts for the publication of James, and delivered the finished manuscript at the end of November. Besides doing all of her own writing and newspaper work, Sue Watkins is close to finishing her part of the typing on the final manuscript for Seth’s Psyche; I still have to spend more time on some of the notes for it. Sue has also agreed that next year she’ll start helping me type my notes and appendix material for Volume 2 of “Unknown.”

(While we’ve been busy with our endeavors, the shortening, brilliantly colored and often warm days of October passed into November and turned progressively colder through the month; we’ve already had more than a little snow since Thanksgiving; and now in a few days [about December 22] winter will officially arrive. I’ve raked leaves, stacked wood in the garage, installed storm windows, and made sure our hill house is otherwise all set for cold weather.

(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.

Now somewhere there is a program director, who must take care of the entire programming. Shows must be done on time, actors assigned their roles. Our hypothetical director will know which actors are free, which actors prefer character roles, which ones are heroes or heroines, and which smiling Don Juan always gets the girl — and in general who plays the good guys and the bad guys.

(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.