“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 …

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.

In those terms I have my own proofs of survival, just as Jane had — and as she still does. We always had far too many questions about such matters to be satisfied with the very restrictive “answers” that our religious and secular establishments offer. I cannot believe that in matters of life and death my psyche would be so foolish as to indulge in wish fulfillment, relaying to me only those ideas it “thinks” I want to consciously know. Each time I may feel my own ignorance about even our own physical reality, let alone other realities, I fall back upon my own feelings and beliefs. I have nowhere else to turn, really, nor did Jane. As Seth told us in a number of ways (and to some extent I’m certainly paraphrasing him here), “Never accept a theory that contradicts your own experience.” Jane and I found much better answers for ourselves, even if they were — and are — only approximations of more basic, and perhaps even incomprehensible, truths. My unimpeded, creative psyche intuitively knows that positive answers to its questions exist, that otherwise it wouldn’t bother to ask those questions within nature’s marvelous framework, that nature is alive and, as best we can sensually conceive of it, eternal. My psyche knows that it makes no sense within nature’s context for the human personality to be obliterated upon physical death.

Last night was the fifth night in a row that I’ve slept on the screened-in back porch in my new sleeping bag. I didn’t start doing this to avoid the bedroom that Jane and I had shared in the hill house for the last nine years, but because I’d always wanted to and now can. Jane is no longer here for me to be so close to, night and day, to leap to take care of when she needs me. She’d never been able to sleep on the porch — one of the reasons we’d had it added onto the house to begin with.

[...] I mentioned this experience briefly in How To Develop Your ESP Power, but here I’m including Rob’s notes which provide a fuller version of the event and our attitude toward it at the time.

Here are the facts Malba gave us as best as we can recall them. [...]

Supposedly it was here where she met her husband, who was a foreman in the plant. [...]

[...] ‘I’m here, though, aren’t I?’ she said.

I have described those early sessions elsewhere, but here I’m including, instead, a poem that is a dramatic, intuitive statement about my feelings at the time. [...]

[...] Here is a brief excerpt from that twelfth session:

I hope you see what I have done here. [...]

[...] (Only a few excerpts were given here.)

[...] As Ruburt told you, I was here at the regular hour last night and aware of the happenings, and perfectly willing to let the session go, understanding the circumstances.

[...] What I am trying to point out here is this supreme egotistical presumption that self-consciousness must of necessity involve humanity per se. [...]

[...] … There are many times that our paths have crossed, and that is why I wanted you here and why you happened onto the art gallery where Ruburt is employed. [...]

[...] There is a reciprocal agreement here, a give and take, quite different from your friend’s idea of psychological invasion.

[...] “Here’s one of those letters. [...] It was here. [...]

“Where does Frank Withers fit in here?” Rob asked.

She stayed here several months, without ever showing any signs of violent behavior. [...]

[...] Had I actually walked here under my own power and forgotten? [...]

[...] From here on, he would continue to comment on my trance experiments and teach me to regulate them.

“We’re having a storm here tonight.”

(Here Jane shoved the board aside, got to her feet and began to dictate:)

(Here Jane’s voice began to get louder and to deepen as she paced back and forth. [...]

Here, however, Seth said to Rob,

[...] What you have here is latent energy, vitality and capacity, with much of it withheld or suspended momentarily. [...]

The state of consciousness involved here is dull as compared to the highly differentiated human ability in many ways. [...]

[...] Here we do not have a rigid bark, as you should not have a rigid ego. [...]

[...] Here are Rob’s notes:

(Seth’s preference here, incidentally, is the direct opposite of my own feeling on the matter. [...]

[...] Here is an account from his own notes:

Here, we took a break. [...]

[...] As I sit here writing these notes, I feel it nibbling away — a bit in my back, on my cheeks and mouth, in my torso. [...]