“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane’s poem can also serve as a symbol to show that she hasn’t held a session for Mass Events for 42 weeks, or since giving the 830th session last March; indeed, the summer, fall, and winter of 1978 have passed, and we’re into the next year [and a very cold and stormy one it is, so far]. We accomplished many things during those nine and a half months, however, including the holding of 56 nonbook sessions. Those sessions, whether private or not, are of course more than double in number the 22 sessions Jane has given for Mass Events [not counting tonight’s]. In connection with our feelings about the long intervals that have materialized several times during the production of this book, see my opening notes for the 815th session — especially those concerning simultaneous time, and my statement that “We do not plan to ask Seth when the book will be done.” I’ll continue our chronology here, then, by describing many of our professional activities since last March, and follow it with Jane’s own account of at least some of the reasons for the long interruption in book work.

(Then in May 1978 Sue Watkins began helping me by typing the final manuscript for the session notes for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. In June, with no hard feelings involved on anybody’s part, Jane withdrew Emir from consideration at Prentice-Hall when the decision was made there to publish the story in two volumes; on July 12, Eleanor Friede at Delacorte Press accepted Emir for publication as a single book. Later in July Sue finished typing the notes and started in on the appendixes for Volume 2, just as we received the first books for James. Jane completed Seven Two in August, and set to work preparing the manuscript for Tam. Late that month — unbelievably to me — I finished my own work on Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, and immediately began to type the final draft of the sessions; as I finished groups of sessions I mailed them to Tam every few days, while at the same time collaborating with Jane on the table of contents for the book. On September 23 Sue delivered the completed appendix material for Volume 2, and I sent Tam each appendix, with its notes, as I checked it. Jane finished typing her manuscript for Seven Two on October 3, and I helped her correct that book for mailing on October 9. My own mailings for Volume 2 continued until the 21st of the month, when at last that very long project was completed and out of the house in its entirety for the first time. I felt like celebrating!

(Resuming our chronology: On October 24, 1978, Jane worked out the Table of Contents for Seth’s Psyche, and started her Introduction for it on the 26th; we mailed Psyche to Tam in sections as we put the manuscript together, and finished with that endeavor on November 9. On November 14 Eleanor Friede visited us to renew an old friendship and to go over Emir with Jane. No sooner had she left than Tam arrived, two days later, bringing with him the copyedited manuscript² of Seven Two for us to check; on the 20th, our work completed on it, I sent it back to him at Prentice-Hall. We received the printer’s sample pages for Seven Two on December 4 [we see these for each book, and they show us just how the work will look when published]. On December 7 the copyedited manuscript for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality came; it’s more than 900 pages long, and painstakingly checking every word on every page of that book kept us busy until Christmas Eve; I mailed it to Tam on December 26. Next, on January 13, 1979, the copyedited manuscript for Psyche arrived. Jane and I are still going over it.

(“Looking over those nine-and-a-half months of sessions now, it’s fairly obvious what Seth was up to. He’d initially given us the material on Frameworks 1 and 2 in private sessions not long after starting Mass Events, as Rob explained in his notes for Session 814. Yet even though Seth also discussed those psychic frameworks to some degree in a dozen sessions for the book, still he finally took that break in dictation to ‘re-educate’ us, looking at our own previous beliefs and those of the world at large in the light of Frameworks 1 and 2.

(“We have our hassles like everyone else, of course. Seth ‘never promised us a rose garden,’ and we have our good days and our bad days as we encounter life’s daily challenges, joys, adventures, and misadventures. In this large group of sessions, Seth addressed himself to several of our individual problems: Rob’s occasional bouts of indisposition when he felt ‘under the weather’ generally, or was bothered by a variety of minor but annoying symptoms; and my own long-standing troubles with severe stiffness. If Seth didn’t give us a rose garden, he certainly did — and does — try to tell us where the weeds come from! This personal material did help give us a much larger perspective on our various challenges, and we’ve made some inroads in overcoming them. Like anyone else, we have to put Seth’s material to use for ourselves. The thing is, often we’re so busy getting the material and preparing it for publication that we don’t have the time to really study it as our readers do. Perhaps Seth was trying to compensate for that in those private sessions, by taking time out from dictation to help us put the material to greater personal use.”

Within those boundaries, certain kinds of experience flourished, and of course others did not. In your society there is no such overall authority. The individual must make his or her own way through a barrage of different value systems, making decisions that were largely unthought of when a son followed his father’s trade automatically, for example, or when marriages were made largely for economic reasons.

(9:43.) Give us a moment… Your subjective options are far greater, and yet so of course is the necessity to place that subjective experience into meaningful terms. If you believe that you do indeed form your own reality, then you instantly come up against a whole new group of questions. If you actually construct your own experience, individually and en masse, why does so much of it seem negative? You create your own reality, or it is created for you. It is an accidental universe, or it is not.

A person could neither be proud of personal achievement nor blamed for failure, since in large measure his characteristics, potentials, and lacks were seen as the result of chance, heredity, and of unconscious mechanisms over which he seemingly had little control. The devil went underground, figuratively speaking, so that many of his mischievous qualities and devious characteristics were assigned to the unconscious. Man was seen as divided against himself — a conscious figurehead, resting uneasily above the mighty haunches of unconscious beastliness. He believed himself to be programmed by his heredity and early environment, so that it seemed he must be forever unaware of his own true motives.⁴

(Pause.) It was in many respects a new world, for it was the first one in which large portions of humanity believed that they were isolated from nature and God, and in which no grandeur was acknowledged as a characteristic of the soul. Indeed, for many people the idea of the soul itself became unfashionable, embarrassing, and out of date. Here I use the words “soul” and “psyche” synonymously. That psyche has been emerging more and more in whatever guise it is allowed to as it seeks to express its vitality, its purpose and exuberance, and as it seeks out new contexts in which to express a subjective reality that finally spills over the edges of sterile beliefs.

The psyche expresses itself through action, of course, but it carries behind it the thrust from which life springs, and it seeks the fulfillment of the individual — and it automatically attempts to produce a social climate or civilization that is productive and creative. It projects its desires outward onto the physical world, seeking through private experience and social contact to actualize its potentials, and in such a way that the potentials of others are also encouraged. It seeks to flesh out its dreams, and when these find no response in social life, it will nevertheless take personal expression in a kind of private religion of its own.