“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.

(During class, Seth commented that this latest Sumari development would help her decipher the very ancient — and largely oral — Speaker “manuscripts” that she mentions in her Introduction. He didn’t say just how this translation was to be accomplished, though. For more notes on the Speakers, and Sumari, see the 623rd session in Chapter Five.)

Natural hypnosis and conscious beliefs give their proper instructions to the unconscious, which then dutifully affects the body mechanism so that it responds in a manner harmonious with the beliefs. So you condition your body to react in certain fashions. Dealing with this is not a simple problem, of course, for the original suggestion of dis-ease was in itself given because of another belief. Using formal hypnosis, and in the West, you may regress and discover where the suggestion was first given you. If you and your hypnotist believe in reincarnation, the source may be discovered in another life.

(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.)

The well-meaning announcements pertaining to heroin, marijuana, and acid (LSD) can also be damaging, in that they structure in advance any experience that people who take drugs might have. On the one hand, you have a culture that publicly points out as common the often exaggerated dangers that can occur with drugs, and on the other holds out drugs as a method of therapy. Here the dangers become something like initiation rites, in which loss of life must be faced before full acceptance into the community can be established. But those involved with native initiation rituals knew far more what they were doing, and understood a framework of beliefs in which the outcome — success — was fairly well assured.

(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.”

(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: