“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.

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.

My own imperfect recollection following Tam’s request that I look for it was that Seth, Dreams … was an unfinished collection of records, ideas, and chapters that Jane had struggled with for several years, without selling it. Instead, what I found in a box in the basement was, to my amazement, a completed manuscript — a full book ready to go, one as fresh as it had ever been, and my wife had struggled with it. What emerged as Laurel Davies and I searched Jane’s and my records, including early Seth sessions, was a long story of our doubts and gropings in an area in which we had no guidance except for our own explorations. Seth, Dreams … was rejected by three major publishers while Jane worked on it during 1966-67. She was still an unknown in the field; by mid-1966 she’d had only one small psychic book, How to Develop Your ESP Power, published. Our subject of interest itself was largely denied validity by the social, psychological, and scientific establishments. We were still operating alone, then, even though Jane had been speaking for Seth for about three years. In spite of all of her questions, however, her strong creative vitality — her intuitive insistence upon using her most unusual abilities — kept her focusing ahead, and I helped her as much as I could. I’m still astonished when I think of what Jane was to accomplish in the next few years.

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.

Rob laughed about all this after the session. “A terrific lot of new material, really startling, on dream reality and some suggestions about your furniture, all in one night!”

[...] You know, now, that all form has consciousness, and so there was no point at which self-consciousness entered with the sound of trumpets, so to speak. [...]

[...] I give you this slight evidence of my humor, Joseph, simply to show you that I am not, after all, one to carry grudges.

“The material was all on related subjects,” Rob said. [...]

[...] She knew the clerks in the town, and that was all. [...]

[...] “If that’s all it is, whose quarrelling with that?”

[...] The session was a long one, and he began by emphasizing the fact that all physical sense data was camouflage.)

The camouflage is necessary at this stage of development — intricate, complicated, various and beyond the understanding of the outer senses, which are the perceptors of the camouflage itself, peculiarly adapted to see under particular circumstances … It is only the inner senses that will give you any evidence at all of the basic nature of life.

During all of this time, Rob and I were having our first experiences with mobility of consciousness. [...] The questions filled me with wonder, and we tried all kinds of experiments.

[...] Then the cycle began all over.

[...] Before the eighth session, all replies came through the board. [...]

[...] So are the wires that we constructed to make our point about the fifth dimension, but for all practical purposes, we must behave as if the wires were there …

[...] 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? That, to me, would be the worst possibility of all — that I might close off knowledge out of uncertainity. [...]

I’d identified all life with the birds, of course. Miss Cunningham, Rob, me and all the people that we knew were surely getting shot down; falling through time, we were dying in a descent that we couldn’t understand or control. [...]

[...] All entities are self-aware portions of the energy of All That Is. [...]

The inner senses operate on all planes and under all circumstances. [...]

[...] It is quite unfair to say that it cannot transport itself, since it does so to an amazing degree; the roots and limbs moving in all directions. The inner senses of all plant life are well attuned, alert and very vital. All of these fragments have consciousness to a rather high degree, considering that man holds them in such low repute.

[...] The freely working subconscious — or the inner you — is completely capable of taking care of all practical considerations and will use the ego as a tool to do so.

[...] You have general immunity, believe it or not, to all such viruses. [...]

When your own personalities are more or less in balance, you have no trouble at all looking out for these creatures and actually reinforcing their existence with residues of your creative and sympathetic powers. [...]

[...] Your all-important ‘I’ does not know. In actuality, my dear friends, the all-important ‘I’ does know. You do not know the all-important ‘I’, and that is your difficulty.

During all this time the curtains were open. [...] There were voices and footsteps in the hall, Rob told me later, but I was not bothered at all. [...]

[...] 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? [...]

[...] In the past, he has more or less translated this data automatically, without realizing it, into paintings, with no memory of any vision at all. [...]

[...] “How come all the concern all of a sudden? [...]

[...] You blundered into it all unaware and unprepared, however. [...]

As Seth continued to explain the inner sense and the unseen reality beneath the objective world that all of us know, I began to understand a little of my situation. [...]

[...] However, by seeing beneath the camouflage in any one case, you can see beneath all camouflage.

[...] In other words, peeping inwards and outwards at the same ‘time’ you will find that all divisions are illusion and all time is one time. [...]

[...] The inner senses are not accustomed to operating so freely, and this sometimes upsets the all-present ego. [...]

[...] It is, after all, a method of acquainting the ego, through effects, with the abilities of the whole self of which it is a part.

[...] This time, there was a remembrance of panic but that was all. [...]