“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(No session was held Monday night. Jane and I had taken a few days off to travel.

(“Honestly,” Jane said the morning after last Wednesday’s session, “I think I was doing book work in my sleep the whole night — only I kept hearing my own voice instead of Seth’s. I even thought of getting up and trying to write down the material, except that I didn’t think it would really work that way. I just hope we’ll get all that great stuff when we do have sessions….” These sleep-state effects were surprisingly persistent; although they were somewhat reduced when she encountered them again on Thursday night, they didn’t taper off altogether until the weekend. One of Jane’s previous experiences in obtaining book material in advance — that on bridge beliefs — is described in the 644th session in Chapter Eleven. Her next nighttime involvement with Seth’s book is reported at the end of this session.

(Jane was very active in ESP class last night, and especially so while speaking and singing in Sumari. A new, more complex dimension has been showing itself in the songs lately — now, often, the “words” and notes are short and rapid as they flit agilely up and down the scale. They remind me of a verbal shorthand. At the same time it seems that Jane is trying to convey several sounds or ideas at once, with but one set of vocal chords.

(10:02. All through this material Jane’s delivery for Seth was most emphatic and fast, and accompanied by many gestures.)

(10:15. “I have the feeling that we’ve been going to town,” Jane laughed. Indeed — but she was out of trance almost at once. Her pace had been good throughout. Resume in the same manner at 10:29.)

(Another long pause at 11:49. Jane’s pace had abruptly slowed drastically. Mysteriously, she now took over six minutes to deliver the title for Chapter Seventeen.)

(This took half a page or so, and the session ended at 12:03 a.m. Jane was very surprised at the time involved in delivering the title for Chapter Seventeen. She had no explanations to offer; in trance she’d experienced only “a brief sense of waiting.”

(Apropos of the notes preceding this session, concerning Jane’s nighttime work on Seth’s book last week: the same kind of effects returned when she went to sleep after this session — but this time she decided to try an experiment. “When I woke up I felt I ‘had’ the whole of four or five chapters ‘all there’ if I could somehow instantly transcribe them,” she wrote the next morning. “I got up at 3:15 a.m., intending to write everything down — and found that the bulk of it had just vanished.

(Jane was left with a page or so of fragmented notes and a couple of possible chapter headings. This is still evocative material, even though she doesn’t know whether Seth will use any of it in his book: “For a ‘Power Chapter’: Each person has his or her own ‘psychic territory of power’ which is not to be relinquished,” she wrote. “…no illness or other condition is allowed to impinge upon this…. It’s far better to think in terms of power than of lacks — the power of life, of motion, of speech, etc. People confuse this with power over their environment, or others, then wonder why power over doesn’t work….

(Jane and I discussed the above data at breakfast the morning after the session. This led me to read her my notes on Seth’s delivery from 11:25 to 11:47, concerning beliefs in relation to body weight. Then after lunch Jane spontaneously wrote the material beginning in the next paragraph; she regards this data as supplementing Seth’s own information on weight. “I didn’t hear any voice while I was doing this,” she said later. “I felt these ideas being inserted, but I did the writing.” The work is close to the way Seth would present it; it probably stems from her efforts last night, we think, to see what she could do with “book work” on her own: