“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Since holding last Wednesday’s 872nd book session, Jane has given two more sessions. Both of them are private, however, and came through on Sunday and Monday evenings.

(Yesterday, with two good friends helping us move all of the furniture, Jane switched rooms. That is, the living room in the hill house is now her writing room, and her one-time writing room at the back, north side of the house has become the living room — or call it the den-and-television room. The new arrangement seems to be a very comfortable one. Jane has been restless lately, and looking for a change. Our friends very accurately picked up on her need, likening the room changes to a mini-vacation for her.

(Over two years ago, in Note 2 for Session 801, and in the opening notes for Session 805, I described our decision to add the writing room to the house. All four of us involved in the moving were quite amused, then — for the friends who helped Jane and me carry the furniture yesterday are the father-and-son contracting team that built the room in the first place.

(10:36 P.M. And on that gentle note Seth brought Mass Events to a close. To the end he stayed with his practice of giving book dictation on Wednesday evenings. Jane and I had expected him to finish his work soon, yet when the moment arrived we still felt a certain surprise, a certain nostalgic letdown: Something we’d counted upon as part of our weekly routine wouldn’t be there any more.

(“I always feel funny when he ends a book,” Jane couldn’t help saying. “I can never believe it. At the same time I want to race through it and see how it all came out….”

(Actually, both of us will continue to be as busy as ever. Jane plans to write an introduction for Mass Events next month, as summer draws to a close. In the meantime she’s occupied with her own latest book, The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto, which she started last May under the Heroics title [see the opening notes for the 854th session]. She’s written the first drafts for many of the chapters of the book by now, and has planned most of the rest of them — although she may change any of her work at any time. Now she reminded me that “a lot of God of Jane is written as my own response to stuff Seth gives in Mass Events.” Jane’s editor, Tam Mossman, hasn’t seen any of her new book yet, although he’s well acquainted with it through a series of lengthy telephone exchanges. Jane thinks she may sign the contracts for it later this year — before Christmas, that is. And her third Seven novel, Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time, waits for her to return to work on it.

(While I’m doing my own work on Mass Events we’ll hold the sessions for Seth’s Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, of course. My own long-range goal in working with the Seth books is one that I’ve found very difficult to achieve: I want to catch up on the backlog of work involved with the books so that I can devote most of my efforts to whatever the current Seth book is — while Seth is still producing it. This would certainly be a luxury for me; in my notes for Mass Events I’ve shown how complicated affairs could get for Jane and me when I had to juggle several projects at once over long periods of time.

(And these final notes: We still don’t know whether the Dutch edition of Seth Speaks has been published — but we do know that our good friend Sue Watkins is presently working on Chapter 15 of Conversations With Seth, the book she’s writing about Jane’s ESP classes. Sue has a few chapters to go, plus some appendix material, and Tam is due to receive her manuscript in January 1980. I also know that as I prepare these notes our 7-month-old kittens, Billy Two and Mitzi, are racing through the house.

(Through all of our personal activities, Jane and I are intensely conscious of the cultural, scientific, artistic, and economic aspects of the world we’ve chosen to live and work in. Each other individual is just as focused in his or her own unique reality, also. Right now, we’re very much aware of all of the good things the people of our world are providing for us and for millions of others, every minute of every day — yet a certain portion of our joint interest in that “outside” world is also directed toward the situation at Three Mile Island, the nuclear power generating plant located some 130 airline miles south of us. Four-and-a-half months ago, one of the two nuclear reactors at TMI malfunctioned and came close to a meltdown of its uranium fuel. The whole world was a spectator at the worst accident in the history of our country’s nuclear power program.

(The latest, Jane and I gather from a variety of reports, is that Three Mile Island’s damaged reactor, Unit No. 2, is still a sealed enigma, just as it was when I described it in Note 1 for Session 856. A great amount of radiation is trapped within the reactor’s containment building, so “many months” still must pass before it can even be entered. And “several years” will pass before scientists and engineers pronounce the site finally and safely decontaminated, at who knows what enormous expense, for each step in that cleanup process will have to be scrupulously managed for maximum safety.

(I left my thoughts about Three Mile Island, and began to consider a closing statement about Seth finishing Mass Events as summer passed its zenith and prepared to blend into fall. Then I had it. Of course: The change of seasons meant that while I would be doing my own work on the book, the geese would be flying south. Already I looked forward to their migration, that ancient movement I’ve become especially fond of since we moved into the hill house over four years ago. Through the geese I want to associate Jane’s and my activities with nature rather than technology, for in nature I sense a great, sublime, ultimate peacefulness and creativity that far surpasses technology, can we but ever manage to approach an understanding of what nature really means for us physical creatures. To me, without getting into questions about the magnificent overall originality embodied in All That Is, nature is the basic physical environment which all “living” species jointly create and manipulate within. And my personal, symbolic way of trying to grasp a bit of nature’s ultimate mystery lies in my admiration for the twice-yearly flights of the geese.