“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The session was witnessed by writer Richard Bach and his editor, Eleanor Friede. They flew into Elmira yesterday after poor weather had delayed their scheduled arrival on Tuesday in time for ESP class. Dick had also visited us in late August, when Seth had Chapter One of this book under way.

(Jane had delivered a rather lengthy but informal session for our guests last night, as we lingered around the supper table after a late meal. Dick recorded it and is to send us a transcript, so later we’ll be able to add a few excerpts from that material to this session.

Now: I will stop at that for now, and take a break. We will be finished with this chapter shortly, and then we will begin the next. (To Eleanor and Dick:) I would speak faster for you, but we need the notes for the book.

(Some notes added later: Dick Bach felt that he didn’t really write Seagull himself. By now the story of that book’s conception is well known: Late one night in 1959, Dick was walking beside a canal near a West Coast beach when he heard a voice say, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” No one else was around. He was astonished. He was even more so when, on his return home, the voice initiated images that gave him the bulk of the book in three-dimensional form. Then it stopped. On his own Dick tried unsuccessfully to finish the manuscript. Nothing happened until one day eight years later, when he suddenly wakened to hear the voice again — and with it came the rest of the book.

(Who wrote it? Dick didn’t claim authorship. He came across The Seth Material, saw similarities in Jane’s and his experiences, and came here to see if she or Seth could explain the phenomenon. There are points of correlation, of course, only Jane is presented not with just a voice but with an entire personality, Seth, who then writes books while she is in an altered state of consciousness. So she and Dick were highly interested in what Seth would say.

(Now here are some near-verbatim quotes from the information Seth gave Dick Bach and company on the evening of September 27, 1972: “Information does not exist by itself. Connected with it is the consciousness of all those who understand it, perceive it or originate it. So there are not records in terms of objective, forever-available banks of information into which you tune. Instead, the consciousness that held, or holds, or will hold the information attracts it like a magnet…. The information itself wants to move toward consciousness. It is not dead or inert. It is not something you grab for, it is also something that wants to be grabbed, and so it gravitates to those who seek it.