“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.

(In line with doing things differently, no session was held last Saturday night because over the weekend we decided to give up the Monday–Saturday session routine we’ve followed for the last eight months, and return to our original practice of holding sessions on Monday and Wednesday evenings. The change was made to give Jane more time on weekends to handle the mail. I don’t think my own daily work patterns will be affected much; I help her with the correspondence, but don’t spend nearly the time at it that she does.)

1. Actually, the second Seven book named itself quite effortlessly as Jane worked on its first chapters: The Further Education of Oversoul Seven.

As I occasionally do in my notes, I’m anthropomorphosizing “science” by casting a multifaceted discipline in simple human or individual terms. But now it seems that when science claims to understand the workings of a molecule of DNA, for example — the “master molecule” of life, as it’s often called — science then states that it’s stripped away the mystery of DNA and reduced our functions to easily understood mechanistic ones. But Jane and I maintain that grasping the marvelous workings of DNA should instead increase our sense of the wonder and mystery of life. The DNA lies exposed in all of its parts, but the questions about the life within it remain unanswered. Why does science want us to live thinking that we’re creatures programmed only for the survival of our selfish genes? Even the biologists (and other scientists) who insist upon our mechanistic bases do so with feeling!