“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.

Piles of trance hours! Here they are. But if I was in trance, was Seth also? He certainly is alert, active, responsive, concerned about people individually and in general, and about the world. And yet I feel that only a portion of his consciousness is here during sessions — the part expressed through me — so that whatever the nature of Seth’s native experience, his performance in our world only hints of a psychological complexity quite beyond our present understanding.

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.

That book, The World View of Paul Cézanne, was published by Prentice-Hall in 1977. No sooner had I finished it, than another, similar experience happened, just as Seth was completing Psyche. The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James came the same way, like mental dictation; only where the Cézanne world view had specialized in art, the James world view was more comprehensive. It commented in depth upon our world since James’s death, and covered American history as it was related to spiritualism, psychology, and democracy.

He discusses in depth the experience of early man and the different organizations of perception that prevailed, and stresses that the species has always had access to “inner data” so that its source of knowledge was never exclusively dependent upon exterior circumstances. According to Seth, it is from this interior body of knowledge that our systemized, objective, information-storing social processes emerge.