“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In Note 1 for the 817th session, which was held on January 30, I wrote that Sue Watkins had recently delivered the last of the typed manuscript for Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche. Actually, she had converted my original typed sessions making up Psyche into standard manuscript form for the publisher; I still have to do many of the notes for the book after I finish my work on Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality several months from now.

(On the other hand, with the copyedited manuscript for James and the concluding chapters of Emir mailed to Prentice-Hall earlier this month, Jane found herself with some unexpected free time. [We don’t expect to receive the page proofs for James, for correcting, until late next month.] Jane began to enjoy her break by writing poetry and doing some painting — but she surprised me when she also spontaneously began to rough out some of the notes for Psyche. She still planned to leave up to me the detailed, even painstaking work that she doesn’t care for: the endless checking and rechecking of dates and events in order to get each note just right. Yet I was more than happy with whatever help she could give, I told her, since it would let us get Psyche published that much sooner after Volume 2.

(I don’t know how long I’ll continue to benefit from Jane’s assistance, though, since poetry, painting, and notes can all be quickly laid aside if she starts a new project, or resumes work on one that she’s kept in abeyance for some time. One such delayed endeavor is an autobiography that she began several years ago. Another is the sequel to her novel, The Education of Oversoul Seven; that first Seven book was published in April 1973 — and lately she’s been thinking of resuming work on Seven Two, as we usually call it.¹ One thing is certain: Jane will see to it that something creative happens to change the status quo, for she’s much too restless and energetic to leave things as they are.

A number of scientists — biologists, zoologists, and psychologists, among others — have recently published highly praised books in which they claim to show how our genes manipulate our individual behavior with only their own genetic survival at stake, even when we think we are displaying subjective qualities like altruism. Jane and I think the idea of such self-centered genetic behavior is much too limited, simple, and “mechanistic,” to use another term that’s currently in scientific vogue. The idea of selfish genes also implies plan on the part of such entities — and so comes dangerously close to contradicting several basic tenets of science itself: among them that life arose by chance, that it perpetuates itself through random mutations and the struggle for existence (or natural selection), and that basically life has no meaning.