“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Without taking into account here the essences of other life forms, do I think the human personality survives physical death? Considering the loving, passionate “work” that Jane and I engaged in for more than twenty years, of course I do. No other answer makes intuitive or consciously reasonable sense to me. I think it quite psychologically and psychically limiting to believe otherwise, for such beliefs can only impede or postpone our further conscious understanding of the individual and mass realities — the overall “nature” — we’re creating. I think that all of us seek answers, and that our searches are expressed in our very lives.

I may be projecting my own fears here, but I don’t agree with the scientific rejection of all portions of the schemata listed above. The objections don’t feel right to me. They question not only Valerie’s sincerity and performance but my own, as well. I keep thinking about the twenty years of ideas and study that Jane and I put into the Seth Material. Surely my contacts with her, and the work of gifted, dedicated people like Valerie, show us human potential in very challenging ways, hinting at how much we have yet to learn about our individual and collective consciousnesses. And out of my own selfish need and longing for my wife, who is dead, I want people to read her books so that they can understand her great contributions.

By now, the sessions were running from seventeen to twenty typed, double-spaced pages and they lasted anywhere from two and a half to three hours. [...] Rob really had a great time, though, for the twenty-fifth session he didn’t have to take notes while we tried out the recorder. [...] He congratulated us on our “twenty-fifth anniversary,” and said jokingly, You will be much older by the time I am through with you. Most of the session was a discussion of ordinary subjective states emphasizing the fact that these could not be pinpointed in a laboratory or understood simply by the use of the ordinary scientific method. [...]

[...] This is our twenty-fourth session, and I am still trying to give you the answers.

Our twenty-sixth session, due Monday, February 17, was not held for two reasons. [...]

[...] I did not really feel like taking fifteen to twenty pages of dictation from Seth; I was concerned lest I miss some of the material.

[...] Later in the day he matted it and put it on the bookcase just before we began our twenty-first session.

[...] The session, the twenty-second, was one of our first spontaneous sessions. [...]

If the twenty-third session roused me to write the poem, it also impressed Rob deeply enough so that he tried a rather complicated experiment with the inner senses — without letting his conscious mind know what he was up to.

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. [...]

[...] In the twenty-seventh session, February 19, 1964, Seth told us we could dispense with the Ouija board completely. [...]

[...] Two days after the twenty-seventh session, we received a letter from him. [...]

In the meantime, we held our twenty-eighth session. [...]

They were married twenty-eight years and had a son and daughter. [...]

[...] They made about twenty miles a day. [...]