“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane had said before the 846th session, which she held a week ago, that she wanted Seth “to get back to” book dictation, and Seth had obligingly given the heading for Chapter 7 at the end of the session. Yet in Monday night’s deleted 847th session that “energy personality essence,” as he calls himself, digressed once again from work on Mass Events to give us more excellent material on plant and animal consciousness. He also discussed such divergent topics as the wide variety of responses that his material generates in correspondents — and not all of those reactions are so favorable, I might add.

(We were very busy with publishing affairs over the weekend. On Friday, April 6, we received from the production department at Prentice-Hall the printer’s page proofs of the index for Seth’s Psyche, and on Saturday morning the proofs for Emir arrived from Eleanor Friede at Delacorte Press. We spent all of our waking hours checking everything, and on Monday Jane called certain people at Prentice-Hall to give her approval of the index while I mailed Emir back to Eleanor.

(While eating supper this evening Jane and I watched the television reports on the series of devastating tornadoes that had struck northern Texas and southern Oklahoma — an area known as “Tornado Alley” — late yesterday afternoon. Over 50 people have been counted dead so far, with hundreds injured and many thousands left homeless. We’ve driven through some of the communities that were damaged. We talked about why people would choose to live in a region where it’s practically certain that such storms will materialize every year. Our questions would also apply to living in any dangerous environment on the planet, of course.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(Long pause.) In the past, and in large areas of the world now, many important decisions are not made by the individual, but by the state, or religion, or society. In this century several issues came to the forefront of American culture: the exteriorization of organized religion, which became more of a social rather than a spiritual entity, and the joining of science with technology and moneyed interests. Ruburt’s book on [William] James would be good background material here, particularly the sections dealing with democracy and spiritualism. In any case, on the one hand each individual was to be equal with each other person. Marriages, for example, were no longer arranged. A man no longer need follow his father’s vocational footsteps. Young adults found themselves faced with a multitudinous number of personal decisions that in other cultures were made more or less automatically. The development of transportation opened up the country, so that an individual was no longer bound to his or her native town or region. All of this meant that man’s conscious mind was about to expand its strengths, its abilities, and its reach. The country was — and still is — brimming with idealism.

I bid you a fond, and even a jolly good evening. And Ruburt’s (Jane’s) material on plants may lead him to some most creative extensions of his own consciousness, and new insights.

(10:42 P.M. Jane remembered that Seth had mentioned tornadoes, which we hadn’t expected him to do. Her delivery in trance has been steady and often quite forceful.

(Seth’s reference to her material on plants concerned some short humorous essays she’d started writing for her own amusement a couple of days ago, in response to some new ideas. Her heading for them is tentative: The Plants’ Book of People. The Plants’ Symposium: People. I think the pieces are very well done. As she progresses with them Jane doesn’t know whether they’ll end up as a book, or even whether she’ll do anything at all with them. If nothing else, she said now, the ideas could find their way into Seth’s material — or else they’d originated in Seth material that was innate within her to start with.)