“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Although each of us had looked over Mass Events occasionally, still it seemed strange to hear Seth come through with new material for it after all of that time had passed, and equally strange to resume work on these notes. I rechecked my opening notes for the last session: Yes, we did finish correcting the page proofs for James early in April 1978. Tam Mossman did visit later that month, and at his urging Jane did go back to work on Seven Two with her old enthusiasm.

(“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.

(“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 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.)

If a man was a sinner, still there was a way of redemption, and the immortality of the soul went largely unquestioned, of course. There were set rules for almost all kinds of social encounters and religious experiences. There were set ceremonies accepted by nearly all for death and birth, and the important stages in between. Church was the authority, and the individual lived out his or her life almost automatically structuring personal experience so that it fit within the accepted norm.

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.

Yet in the midst of these beliefs each individual seeks to find a context in which his or her life has meaning, a purpose which will rouse the self to action, a drama in whose theme private actions will have significance.

(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.

When God went out the window for large masses of people, fate took His place (long pause), and volition also became eroded.

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

Give us a moment… Basically, religion is an activity through which man attempts to see the meaning of his life. It is a construction based on deep psychic knowledge. No matter what the name it might go by, it represents man’s connection with the universe.