“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane began dictating Seth Speaks in January 1970. In March, Tam signed her to a contract for Seth, Dreams … on behalf of Prentice-Hall. The Seth Material was published. Jane was on a creative roll. She kept changing and adding to the portions of Seth, Dreams … that she hadn’t used in The Seth Material, while at the same time her new work kept crowding it out. Finally, in 1971 Tam converted her contract for Seth, Dreams … into one for Seth Speaks. Jane didn’t keep on trying to sell Seth, Dreams … Neither did I, and somehow that perfectly good book ended up packed away. Tam left Prentice-Hall for other employment in 1982; he became my agent after Jane’s death in 1984. When at his request I rediscovered Seth, Dreams … three months ago, and examined it, I couldn’t believe that that finished manuscript had never been published. I’m most pleased that Jim Young accepted it at once for Stillpoint Publishing — just as I know Jane is!

How Seth, Dreams … eventually came to be issued by Stillpoint Publishing, how it can even be thought of as a “lost manuscript,” makes a most interesting account that I’ll just outline here. First, though, I remind the reader that Jane spoke in a trance or dissociated state for a discarnate personality who calls himself Seth; by his own definition he’s an “energy personality essence,” no longer focused within physical reality. Last July my agent, Tam Mossman, phoned to ask that I search Jane’s papers for a manuscript he remembers her submitting to him some seventeen years ago, when he had been a young editor just beginning a career with Prentice-Hall. That manuscript is Seth, Dreams and Projection of Consciousness. As soon as he’d reviewed it back then, Tam had asked Jane to do a book on Seth himself. The result? The Seth Material, for which Jane signed a contract in December 1968. The book came out in 1970; and in it she had used certain portions of Seth, Dreams …

(But first this note, In Appendix 19 for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, I offer material from Jane and from Seth about that atonal, very distant-sounding Seth Two. I quote myself as writing that “Seth Two exists in relation to Seth in somewhat the same manner that Seth does to Jane, although that analogy shouldn’t be carried very far.”)

I don’t care for the term “channeling,” since I think it too all-inclusive and already trite. However, I liked both Jim’s ideas of my doing the Preface for Jane’s book, and of publishing a photo of her. And Laurel Lee Davies, the young lady who’s now helping me carry on my publishing activities, at once intuitively picked out from my files the one right photograph of Jane to us for Seth, Dreams … Jane’s father, Delmer Roberts, took the snapshot when she was on vacation with him in Baja, California in 1951. She was twenty-two years old. Jane and I didn’t meet until 1954. That little picture, then, was taken some twelve years before she began “coming through” with the Seth material. Yet, I find in it all of the ingredients that made up the Jane I knew — her great beauty, personality and creativity, her love of manipulating within her physical environment; I see her “steering herself” toward extraordinary accomplishments.

In this particular period, we had Seth and the Seth Material only — twenty-six sessions — and thus far, no evidential material at all; there was nothing to go on except our experience and faith in ourselves. [...]

[...] Whether or not he and Seth were friends in a past life, they became good friends in this one. Some excellent evidential material was to be obtained through sessions with Mark several years later. He was to recall Seth’s warning to cut down on drinking because of his predisposition to gout; he came down with gouty arthritis.

When your training is much further advanced, we may be able to take certain shortcuts, Seth continued. It is difficult for me to have to string this material out in words and for you to record it. You see, it is possible, in theory, for you to directly experience a concept-essence of the material in any given session. [...]

[...] In it, Seth assured us that the sessions were constructive and made many comments quoted in The Seth Material about the nature of the subconscious, repeating that he was an independent personality.

[...] At this point, the Seth sessions themselves had only been going on for a month and a half. We had had no instances of clairvoyance or any evidential material except for that provided in the early séance, and we had both decided that we weren’t ready to try anything like that again for some time.

[...] “The Seth material could be coming from some deep inner source, an intuitive bank of inner knowledge available to everyone if they only look for it,” I said. [...]

I was really quite tired, yet after the session, I was astonished to discover that Seth had dictated an excellent exposition on the physical senses and had begun a description of the inner ones. [...] Seth began by speaking about the physical senses.

Had I been using Seth’s “inner senses” in the Bronson experience? [...]

[...] “The Seth Material will be published, and you’ll help the world — it’s too much! [...] And Malba didn’t sound terribly bright; at least Seth is intelligent and knows what he’s talking about. [...] This way I’m trying to figure out if Seth is independent or not … [and] worrying about a Malba, too.”

[...] For one thing, I distrusted the “prediction” that the Seth Material would be published.

[...] Rob told me later that he was squirming some, as I paced back and forth, delivering this material as Seth.

Following Seth’s suggestions, Rob began doing a few simple yoga exercises, and the night before the eighteenth session he used self-hypnosis to relax his muscles. [...] Seth began to comment on this in the beginning of the next session. [...]

I wasn’t about to close off the Seth material until I made up my mind, though. [...] Suppose I stopped having the sessions while I tried to figure things out, then decided that Seth was right on all counts — and found I just couldn’t have sessions again? [...]

[...] Either that, or Seth and the material — still so strange to me — were giving answers that I refused, so far, to accept in practical terms.

One night Rob asked Seth about it, and Seth said,

Both of us had been wondering about the crisis Seth had mentioned for Miss Cunningham on April 15. As it happened a regular session night fell on that date, and, having heard nothing, Rob asked Seth if there had been any distortion in the message.

[...] Seth told Rob that he’d seen only part of the room, described the rest of it and gave further details about Dick’s English life. The session lasted until 11:15 when Rob, not Seth, got tired, and suggested that we stop for the night. Seth said, Sleepy time is no crime. Now I am no poet, and you know it. Rob laughed, because Seth likes to tease me about my poetry.

[...] When he typed up Seth’s material on the first inner sense, though, he tried a simple deliberate experiment. [...]

(Seth’s preference here, incidentally, is the direct opposite of my own feeling on the matter. He uses emotional inflections delivering the material that greatly add to the meaning of the words themselves, however, and he may have had this in mind. [...]

[...] A woman’s slumber is, after all, a private and sacred thing. Seth said this with a dry sense of humor, then added, See how prim that last sentence would sound without the lively inflection I managed to give to Ruburt’s voice? [...] The material was coming through from her own entity.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but in these early sessions, Seth was gently leading us down the “garden path” — it became more difficult to think of the world in the usual terms, for example. Even though I had come to no conclusions as to what Seth was or wasn’t, the Seth material itself fascinated me. Its source in Seth made it only too clear that other channels of information and experience were open to us beside those we had known earlier.

Rob was intrigued not only by the material but by Seth himself as he began to manifest his own personality more clearly. My voice had been undergoing changes, becoming more similar to what we now call the Seth voice — deeper, lower, richer in tone than mine and more masculine. But on this particular night, Rob watched, amused, while Seth told him in no uncertain terms what he thought of my experiment — using my own lips to do it! [...]

(In an earlier session, Seth said that while on vacation in Maine, we both unwittingly created two images — versions of ourselves — and then reacted to them. See The Seth Material.)

[...] He could see the change that came over me while I was speaking for Seth, and Seth inspires confidence. Rob liked Seth immediately. [...] Through me, Seth related to Rob. [...]

[...] And in our 12th Session Seth gave what I still think of as a cornerstone that served as a preliminary framework upon which the rest of The Seth Material would be built. I have quoted parts of it in other books, yet the analogy Seth gave us is such an excellent introduction to the interior universe and to his ideas that it is almost indispensable. [...]

I had only begun speaking for Seth a few sessions earlier. [...] We began this one with the Ouija board, but after only a few moments, I shoved it aside and began dictating as Seth. [...]

[...] Those of you who read my two other books in this field know that the experiments were astonishingly successful and led, through the Ouija board, to our first contact with Seth.

[...] Seth didn’t really announce himself until we had worked with the Ouija board four times. [...]