“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.”

(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.

(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.)