“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The last session we presented in Mass Events, the 841st, was held on March 14. On the 19th we received from our publisher for checking the proofs of the index for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, then two days later the proofs for the front matter of Psyche arrived. Going over these two sets of material was routine; nothing had to be returned, and in each case Jane called Tam Mossman at Prentice-Hall to give her approval and to make a few suggestions for changes. She’s worked each day at her third novel on the adventures of Oversoul Seven, and has heard often from Sue Watkins about Sue’s progress with her book on Jane’s ESP class: Conversations With Seth.¹ And with all of her other activities, Jane has held four sessions since the 14th: two personal ones, and two [842–43] on matters other than book dictation.

(Now there’s talk of evacuating up to a million people who live in the counties surrounding Three Mile Island. Some refugees have already reached the Elmira area, where we live, and upon checking a map Jane and I were surprised to see that we’re only about 130 airline miles north of Harrisburg. We’ve driven the much longer road distance comfortably enough in one day. “Strange,” I mused to Jane, “that of all the nuclear power plants in the world, we end up living that close to the one that goes wrong….”

(Our region is supposed to be outside the danger zone — yet we see conflicting newspaper reports about whether the prevailing wind currents would make us vulnerable to the after-effects of a meltdown. Even now, local civil defense officials monitor the air several times daily with radiological survey meters — equipment similar to Geiger counters. Jonestown was far away, remote in another land, I said to Jane, but the potential mass tragedy at Three Mile Island hovers at the edges of our personal worlds. The whole affair has a sense of unreal immediacy, because there’s nothing to see, and because I don’t think most people really understand the probabilities involved. It would be hardly a coincidence, I added, that the mass events at Jonestown and Three Mile Island took place within less than six months of each other, and that they represented the two poles, or extremes, of mankind’s present main belief systems: religion and science.

(Actually, the session might better be called a Jane/Seth session, in that Jane’s own consciousness was often uppermost, riding upon Seth’s underlying and steadying influence. This rather unusual situation came about because after lunch today she wrote excellent analyses of two dreams I’d had recently. As we sat at the kitchen table discussing her work, Jane felt that she could go into a trance state that was her own for a change, instead of being in “just” a Seth trance. She began delivering the material at a measured pace in her usual voice. As soon as I realized that she wanted to have a session I asked her to wait until I found my pen and notebook. Then Jane proceeded to come through with much evocative material on dreams — our second reason for excerpting the session for Mass Events. Some of the more generalized material is presented below, some of the more individualized portions [which, in fact, came at the start of the session] are given in Note 2.

(After drinking half a glass of milk during a break, Jane resumed her delivery at 4:30:)

(4:45. “I’ve learned something this afternoon,” Jane said during a brief, unannounced break. “I’ve thought of it before, but finally I’m getting it through my head that the sessions are much better when I don’t have any concern — and when I feel concern, I find it harder to get into it. I began to get cautious toward the end there, in some fashion…. I think we’d have gotten more on the nuclear thing otherwise.” She didn’t think any fear of making predictions that might turn out to be wrong had anything to do with this concern.

(“I remember he — Seth — even helped me out with stuff on the Christ drama in there,” Jane said. “Oh-oh, there’s more —” and she went back into “her” trance almost at once.)

(End at 4:47 P.M. “Okay,” Jane said. “I knew there was some connection between the Christ thing and what’s happening in the world today, and that was it. I like it when it’s fun, and that was fun. That was a nice smooth state of consciousness.

2. Much of Jane’s trance material on how individuals use dreams personally came through in answer to a question of mine that we’d often speculated about lately: If most people do not remember their dreams most of the time, of what use can their dreams be to them? The question was really based upon our belief, indeed our certainty, that everything in nature is intentional and useful; therefore dreams must fulfill important roles in people’s lives — but how, in ordinary terms? Here are quotations from the answers Jane gave while in trance today: