“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Now another event took place in October 1978 that is most important to Jane and me: Sue Watkins received the go-ahead from Tam Mossman to write a book on the ESP classes that Jane had conducted for some seven and a half years, from the fall of 1967 to February 1975. It’s to be called Conversations With Seth. This is great news for the three of us, of course. It’s a project that Jane herself never figured she’d do, but wanted done — and Sue, who was a class member, is talented psychically herself, has a newspaper and reporting background, and is ideally qualified for the job.¹ (Conversations, we think, is sure to be published before Mass Events, since Tam is supposed to have Sue’s manuscript in hand by January 1980, for publication in the fall of that year. Even assuming that Seth will finish dictating Mass Events later this year [1979], Jane and I will still have too much work to do on it for publication in 1980.

(“In an important fashion those private sessions parallel his material for Mass Events … material that did make us view the world and current events quite differently than we had earlier. Several times we asked about local fatal accidents we read about, for instance, wondering how such events fit in Frameworks-1-and-2 activity. Some of those sessions were devoted to our private beliefs, but usually Seth put such beliefs into the larger social context. Four days after they took place, he began discussing the disastrous events at Jonestown, Guyana, involving the murder or suicide of more than 900 Americans in that South American settlement last November 18, 1978. Since then, we’ve voiced our hopes often that Seth will go into the entire Jonestown affair in Mass Events; he can’t but help be aware of our wishes! So interspersed in all of that private material are some excellent — and lively — discussions of events current in the world at that time, as well as discourses on connections between creativity and Framework 2, and topics as diverse as psychotic behavior and early civilizations. It was as though Seth were trying to help us break up old associations for once and for all. Certainly he tried his best, and any failings are on our parts.

(“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.”

(We held our first session for 1979 — a private one — on the evening of New Year’s Day. During it Seth remarked that he’d “begin book sessions again next Wednesday,” but that didn’t quite work out; he still had a few more nonbook sessions to go. Jane has been looking over his material on Mass Events every so often lately, though, with the idea of going back to work on it. And then, on the very night when she told me that she thought Seth would resume book dictation, Sue Watkins called with news that it was all official now: Today she’d signed her contract with Prentice-Hall for the publication of Conversations With Seth.)

So your present experience is quite different than that of those forefathers who lived in the medieval world, say, and you cannot appreciate the differences in your [present] subjective attitudes, and in the quality, as well as the kind of, social intercourse that exists now. For all its many errors, at its best Christianity proclaimed the ultimate meaning for each person’s life. There was no question but that life had meaning, whether or not you might agree as to the particular meaning assigned to it.

(9:35.) Men’s dreams were also different in those times, filled far more with metaphysical images, for example, more alive with saints and demons — but overall one framework of belief existed, and all experience was judged in its light. Now, you have far more decisions to make, and in a world of conflicting beliefs, brought into your living room through newspapers and television, you must try to find the meaning of your life, or the meaning of life.

(I told her it was fun to get the dictation, that it reminded me that there are other things in life besides personal sessions. It also reminded me of how good the material could be in its more generalized context, and that there were available from Seth reservoirs of information that we’d never be able to fully explore, simply because of our ages and other time-related limitations. My thoughts brought up feelings of regret, of course, but Jane suggested that instead we concentrate upon what we could do. Good advice.

Not only was he set against himself, but he saw himself as a part of an uncaring mechanistic universe, devoid of purpose, intent, and certainly a universe that cared not a whit for the individual, but only for the species. Indeed, a strange world.

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.

(10:27. Seth came through with half a page of information for Jane — personal material that’s deleted here — then ended the session at 10:34 P.M. “I’m so unsure of myself it must be terrible,” Jane said as soon as she came out of trance. “I’m so glad he’s back on the book again. I keep asking: ‘Is it good, is it good?’ I know it is, but I’ve got that empty feeling again, because of the suspense….”)

1. Jane and I had suggested to Sue last month (September) that she write a book on ESP class, although at various times previously the three of us have discussed such a project. Sue took us up on the idea this time, though — and was both exhilarated and terrified when Tam, who was instantly enthusiastic, asked her for an outline and a couple of chapters. “Doing the outline for the book came easily,” Sue wrote for this note, later, “but then I spent the next four weeks in hell. The writing of the first chapter was agonizing and slow….” After that initial plunge, though, she’s been doing very well.