“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I know very well that there were evenings when I “should” have held our regular Seth session, but didn’t, for reasons also forgotten. Perhaps I didn’t feel up to par, or sat at my desk, involved in my own writing. Perhaps an unbidden guest dropped by, or holidays intruded. Actually, I was quite concerned with the quick passage of time, and the pressure to prepare manuscripts for publication. During the period that Seth was dictating this book, Rob was typing the two volumes of Seth’s previous work, The “Unknown” Reality, and adding innumerable notes that correlated Seth’s material with that of his earlier books. I knew that on session nights, Rob “lost” his work time on that project, and he still had to type up the latest book session on the following day, while all I had to do was … what? Turn into Seth.

Rob typed Seth’s other books, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, The Nature of Personal Reality, and the two volumes of The “Unknown” Reality, added his own notes, and did almost all the work of preparing them for publication. He was still working on The “Unknown” Reality when Seth finished this present book. Then almost immediately Seth began another, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events.

I’d been producing my own books during this time, and getting them ready for publication, so surely Seth wasn’t taking up any creative slack of my own. Still, I stared at Psyche when Seth finished it, wishing that he could type, too! I thought back to all of those unremembered trance hours, looking at them from a different standpoint — and almost startled by a simple thought that just hadn’t occurred to me in quite that way before: Those trance hours were productive. They yielded results in the world of time. That trance consciousness, by whatever name, knew what it was doing. And I wondered: What must I look like to Rob as I leaned forward as Seth, smiling, (my glasses off, Seth’s eyes darker than mine), joking as Seth, gesturing, waiting while Rob got me (Jane), a beer? I’m sure there is a kind of trance memory, but my ordinary memory records very little of those trance hours.

Yet I can’t remember offhand what happened in my normal daily life during those past days, either. So “real” time and trance time have each vanished: And this week I’ll go into trance, and again Seth will dictate part of another book that Rob will be typing up for publication a year or so from now. Then, this today will also be part of the past. In our terms.

I say: “In our terms,” because the sessions themselves seem ever-present, despite all I’ve just said. They seem to contain an energy that comes alive in Seth’s words, so that they belong to the future as well as to the past. Those words were all originally spoken, spontaneously and emphatically, though slowly enough for Rob to take notes. They were enunciated in Seth’s own peculiarly accented tones; accompanied by gestures in a living performance that I hope the reader will keep in mind.

As most of our readers know, Seth began calling me Ruburt, and my husband, Rob, Joseph, early in the sessions. He explained that these were our entity names, and I was half amused to have a male one, and to find Seth referring to me as “he” or “him.” When I had classes, Seth gave many students their entity names also, and there was much lively discussion over the names’ sexual designations.

According to Seth any of us can tune in to such “extra” information, but we would receive it in accordance with our own desires and intents. My own interest in art and Rob’s appreciation of Cézanne’s works helped trigger the Cézanne book, for example; and my own curiosity about William James and Rob’s appreciation of his work helped bring about the James manuscript.

We were most eager to get this particular material to the public, since many correspondents write requesting Seth’s views on sexuality. This desire, coupled with Seth’s seemingly endless creativity, led us to a decision: From now on, the Seth books will carry far fewer notes. In the two volumes of The “Unknown” Reality, Rob tried to correlate Seth’s views on various subjects, tracing them backward to his earlier books (and often to unpublished material), showing the context in which the books were written. Now we will include usual session notes, but the reader will have to keep track of the development of the theories or correlate them with previous Seth books at his or her leisure.