“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.

(Through all of the mass and personal events referred to in the sessions and notes since she gave the 832nd session on January 29, Jane has occasionally written poetry and painted — and worked steadily at her third Seven novel: Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time. “I’ve done 16 chapters so far out of maybe 25 for the book,” she said, “but some of them need more work.”

There was some hope, at least, in looking for better living conditions personally. There was some hope in forgetting one’s doubts in whatever exterior distractions could be found. Idealism is tough, and it is enduring, and no matter how many times it is seemingly slain, it comes back in a different form. So those who felt that religion had failed them looked anew to science, which promised — promised to — provide the closest approximation to heaven on earth: mass production of goods, two cars in every garage, potions for every ailment, solutions for every problem. And it seemed in the beginning that science delivered, for the world was changed from candlelight to electric light to neon in the flicker of an eye, and a man could travel in hours distances that to his father or grandfather took days on end.

To one extent or another, all of the events of their lives happen punctuated or accented by the possibility of disaster. They feel that at any time they might be caused to face the greatest challenge, to rely upon their strongest resources, their greatest forbearance, and faced by a test of endurance. They use — or they often use — such a psychological and physical backdrop to keep those qualities alive within themselves, for they are the kind of people who like to feel pitted against a challenge. Often the existence of probabilities and their acceptance does provide a kind of exterior crisis situation that individually and en masse is a symbol of independence and inner crisis. The crisis is met in the exterior situation, and as the people deal with that situation they symbolically deal with their own inner crises. In a way (underlined) those people trust such exterior confrontations, and even count upon a series of them (intently), of varying degrees of severity, that can be used throughout a lifetime for such purposes.