“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As soon as I took Jim Young up on his word that I could make whatever statement I want to about Jane’s work, I knew that this Preface would contain relatively little about Seth, Dreams and Projection of Consciousness itself, and I wrote to Jim about this. The book stands perfectly well on its own. These notes, then, will contain material not only about Jane, but my own involvement with her, her work, and her death. I trust that even though physically she’s no longer with me, my wife agrees with my choices, for she helped me learn that the one truly unique thing I have to offer the world is my own creation of it.

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 …

Jane began dictating Seth Speaks in January 1970. In March, Tam signed her to a contract for Seth, Dreams … on behalf of Prentice-Hall. The Seth Material was published. Jane was on a creative roll. She kept changing and adding to the portions of Seth, Dreams … that she hadn’t used in The Seth Material, while at the same time her new work kept crowding it out. Finally, in 1971 Tam converted her contract for Seth, Dreams … into one for Seth Speaks. Jane didn’t keep on trying to sell Seth, Dreams … Neither did I, and somehow that perfectly good book ended up packed away. Tam left Prentice-Hall for other employment in 1982; he became my agent after Jane’s death in 1984. When at his request I rediscovered Seth, Dreams … three months ago, and examined it, I couldn’t believe that that finished manuscript had never been published. I’m most pleased that Jim Young accepted it at once for Stillpoint Publishing — just as I know Jane is!

[...] Rob and I had never met his wife. Nor was he a close friend, merely a good acquaintance who lived out of town and visited Elmira only when his business required it, about once every six weeks.

[...] Mark sat there fascinated, Rob told me later, his salesman’s smile replaced by bewilderment and determination. [...] He was to recall Seth’s warning to cut down on drinking because of his predisposition to gout; he came down with gouty arthritis.

The session went on as Seth gave Rob some excellent psychological insights into his own behavior, and tied this is with early experience in this life, and with relationships with his present family in past life existences. [...]

[...] While the individual suffers and enjoys his given number of years, these years are but a flash to the entity. [...] As you give inner purpose and organization to your dreams, and as you obtain insight and satisfaction from them, though they involve only a portion of your life, so the entity to some extent directs and gives purpose and organization to his personalities. [...]

[...] His name was Albert Lang. [...] The cobbler and his wife had no children. [...]

[...] “Do you want some now?”
Rob shook his head.
“There’s something that wants you back at the board.
You’d better sit down again.”

But he was benign and jovial as a bishop
Someone might ask in for an evening of tea,
And when he let me peek out through his eyes,
The familiar living room seemed very strange.

[...] “His name came up the other day. [...]

[...] After his death, the second wife went to California to live with the stepson and his family, a fact that further upset Malba.

(And in the next (nineteenth) session on January 17, 1964, Seth did carry his discussion on the inner sense further, and he gave us additional clues as to how we could use them. As you’ll see, we were shortly to put his methods to work. [...]

This sense would permit our man to feel the basic sensations felt by the tree, so that instead of looking at it, his consciousness would expand to contain the experience of what it is to be a tree. According to his proficiency, he would feel in like manner the experience of being the grass and so forth. [...]

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

She did not remember him … as she taught his children. He admired her very much as his children, one in particular, found her an excellent teacher. Frank Withers considered her a friend, attaching more importance than she did to her influence upon his children. [...]

The idiot cries.
The tears slosh inside his boots.
The people say he’s bats
Because he weeps
When the police shoot down the starlings
Aiming at the tall-eyed trees.

One man bent to wash his hands in it
And saw
The skin peel off like dirt,
But the lawn was full
With the falling corpses of the birds,
And when he cried out, no one heard.

It’s one of my little tricks to add to Ruburt’s faltering and erratic confidence — and again, this is with his inner permission.

[...] The part of himself that did ‘teach’ him to see still guides his movements, still moves the muscles of his eyes, still becomes conscious despite him when he sleeps, still breathes for him without thanks or recognition and still carries on his task of transforming energy from an inner reality into an outer one. Man becomes trapped by his own artifically divided self.

The mover, the breather, the dreamer
Shares with me this fond flesh.
He is a twin so like myself
That I cannot recognize his face.
He goes his way and I go mine.
We never meet head-on, and yet
I am aware of this ghost
Behind my every word or act.
Who moves? [...]

Rob spent the next Saturday afternoon in his studio, as usual, painting and doing other artwork. [...]

[...] Rob “knew” that he was seeing the bedroom in which his brother, Dick, had died in a past life in England. [...]

[...] She told Rob that our work with Seth was a lifetime project, that we would publish his manuscripts, and help spread his ideas. [...]

[...] I’ll ask him to comment, if he doesn’t on his own.”

[...] You could not have maintained his health for many years in any case. [...]

[...] He also carried on with his discussion of the ego and health, giving an excellent analysis of the ego’s relationship to the personality as a whole. [...]

[...] … Often, just beforehand Ruburt does not have a thought in his head … and then my ‘excellent’ dissertations begin, if you will forgive a touch of egoism on my part. He wants to know where the words are coming from and still wonders if I am a part of his subconscious; and I must admit that I find such an idea appalling. He wants his answers given to him in a way that his conscious mind can understand. [...]

[...] He began to go into the inner senses more thoroughly and Rob really pricked up his ears, hoping that Seth would mention his three recent experiences. Were they the results of his fumbling attempts to use the inner senses?

Rob took his pad over to the high old-fashioned TV set we had then. It made a good desk, and he stood up to take his notes for the rest of the session.

The next day, though, Rob found himself “paying” for his freedom from notes. [...] It was much easier and quicker to work from his own handwritten notes.

In the next session the following night, Seth launched into the nature of my last trance experience and used it as a stepping stone for his first real discussion of the nature of human personality. [...]

Rob was intrigued not only by the material but by Seth himself as he began to manifest his own personality more clearly. [...]

[...] I came in halfway on an interesting little experiment that Ruburt tried on his own, and you can thank me that he came out of it so well. [...]

(With a laugh, Rob told me that as Seth, I’d been pacing up and down the room, giving “myself” the dickens about the trance experiment, then switching to the humorous comparison of his voice and mine. [...]