“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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 …

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.

[...] She is focusing less and less in this plane of reality, and again, gradually, she will begin to focus in another. [...]

[...] The new personality is not entirely focused, and it must make immediate critical adjustments of the strongest nature. [...]

[...] I’m convinced that this sort of exercise is most valuable in that it helped to shake our consciousness out of its usual focus in objective, ego-oriented reality.

“What crops did they grow?” he asked, and I tried to rouse myself enough to keep on speaking while still retaining focus on these strange shifting scenes.

[...] But another part of my consciousness was focused on the gun, and I was intent upon describing it as well as possible.

[...] In your case, it enables you to focus your artistic ability along lines necessary to make it effective on your plane. [...]

[...] It is in a state of drowsiness on the one hand; and on the other, it focuses the usable portion of its energy into being a tree.

The awareness is focused along certain lines. [...]

The cat focuses upon one thing at a time even though it has no strong ego. [...] You get a subconscious focus different in many ways from conscious concentration. In this state the attention is focused inward rather than outward, and it is the inner rather than the outer senses that are being exercised. [...] Its inner senses were focused in my direction.

The inner senses are capable of expansion and of focus in a way unknown to the outer ones, and the inner world, of course, is a part of all realities. [...]