“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.

(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.

(“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.”

(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.

(9:59. Jane wasn’t too surprised that Seth had returned to his book, since before the session she’d thought he would. Yet, she’d been “a bit nervous, even if it is dumb or stupid: I still wonder if I can do it after a layoff. The stuff isn’t anything like I thought I’d get, though….” It seemed incredible to us now that the last book session had been held over nine months ago.

(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.

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.