“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(Since last March, then, we’ve been holding our private, or nonbook, sessions twice a week usually: Their regular production came to be a steady, reassuring flow of creativity in back of all of the other, often hectic activities I’ve listed here. Those 56 sessions are too numerous to quote in any meaningful way, and even difficult to briefly summarize. Jane did review them for me while I was working on this note, however, and here’s a slightly edited version of what she wrote as a result of her study:

(“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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

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.