“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Many people know of Jane’s death by now, and this makes it impossible for me to deal with that event in chronological order within her books. By rights, I shouldn’t be mentioning it sequentially until I publish the two books that Jane and I had finished while she was hospitalized — then it would be all right to announce that she is dead! But for convenience’s sake, in Seth, Dreams … I bring together certain events in chronological time; I feel that its having been written some time ago makes this book the ideal place for me to discuss Jane’s death, to unite the “past,” the “present,” and the “future’; I regard it as being next in line after Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, which Prentice-Hall, Inc. is publishing in two volumes in the spring and fall of 1986. In Dreams, “Evolution, “… I stuck to Jane’s production of the Seth Material for that work, plus a strict chronological account of our personal lives while she delivered it. I made no leaps in time to write about her physical death, for to me that sad event lay too far in the future — over two and a half years — from the time she finished dictating Dreams, “Evolution,” … in February 1982.

I began thinking about and working upon this Introduction for Seth, Dreams … late in October 1985. As I reread the book I learned that Jane devotes considerable portions of several chapters to material involving our friend, Sue Watkins — her adventures with dreams, projections, and probable realities — and also refers to her in other chapters. Sue published her two-volume work, Conversations With Seth, in 1980-81; her father died two years later. I’ve already referred to Laurel Lee Davies, the young lady who now works with me (and is helping especially with proofreading and answering mail). Ever since she arrived from the West Coast in August, Laurel had wanted to meet Sue, who lives in upstate New York. The three of us finally did meet — a few days after Sue’s mother had died on October 19. Two nights earlier, Sue had had a very strong precognitive dream concerning her mother’s death; she plans to discuss that event in the book she’s writing. Laurel made a card for Sue when we heard about the demise of her mother, and left room inside it for me to write a note. Here’s what I spontaneously produced.

(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.”)

After Jane’s death I became extremely busy. I had to cope with my grief, and one way I chose was to immediately begin keeping elaborate records in and writing essays for a series of “grief notebooks.” I told no one about the notebooks, or the three drawings I had made of Jane as she lay in her bed right after her death. I was obligated to spend many months finishing a Seth book — Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment — that we had started way back in September 1979, long before she went into the hospital; as I had planned to, I resumed work on that project the day after she died. (Jane was cremated the next day, in a process we had agreed upon several years ago.) I also worked upon two other books we collaborated upon after she had been hospitalized. There were many legal matters to attend to, much mail to answer, and more to keep up with.

“It was two days overland by stage, two days by horseback. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] You cannot see through, but the two planes move through each other constantly.

Again, if you will consider our maze of wires, I will ask you to imagine them filling up everything that is, with your plane and my plane like two small birds nests in the netlike fabric of some gigantic tree … Consider, for example, that these wires are also mobile, constantly trembling and also alive, in that they not only carry the stuff of the universe but are themselves projections of this stuff, and you will see how difficult it is to explain. [...]

[...] I’d written two poems on the idea, and the day after the starlings were killed, I did another:

[...] She was so persuasive that the first two times this happened, I wondered if she was getting threatening mail, as unlikely as this seemed. [...]

[...] The neighborhood was middle-class, the house gray-framed, two-storied, with a front porch.

[...] So I never made any connection at first between the two experiences. [...]

[...] Malba didn’t know where the daughter was, but she did know that her son now had two boys of his own. [...]

[...] I may have confused the two names …

[...] “Two adults waiting for an invisible personality to tell them about an invisible world, waiting for instructions on how to use inner senses,” I said. [...]

[...] Yet, if two people see the same ‘apparition,’ then instantly twice the evidence is required.

Later, closing the session, he added two afterthoughts. [...]

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

It was in this session that Seth made the analogy of the “weird creature with two faces,” one turned to physical reality and one to inner reality, both conscious and aware, each representing one facet of our consciousness.

[...] The two of them set up an excellent rapport. [...] It was a terrific change for me to suddenly have to rely on someone else — even Rob — to tell me what “I” had been saying for a period of two or three hours.

(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. [...]

(Still in trance, I turned off the brightest of our two lights, then opened the blinds. [...]

[...] It is literally caught between two worlds. [...]

The first time, the sensation was not as strong as the next two times. [...] I waited quietly, and in a moment or two the sensation was gone. [...]

The next two sensations came later in the evening. [...]

[...] For instance, when I tell you that the second inner sense is like your sense of time, this does give you some understanding of what psychological time is like, but you are apt to compare the two too closely.

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. [...]

[...] It maintains constant awareness and the ability to adjust itself in two completely different worlds, so to speak — one in which it meets little resistance in growing upward and one composed of much heavier elements into which it must grow downward. Man needs artifical methods to operate effectively on land or in water, but the so-called unconscious tree manages nicely in two worlds as diverse, certainly, as land and water, and makes itself a part of each.

[...] Two sessions a week were more than sufficient, I thought — I was afraid of going into trance at the drop of a hat.)