“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 …

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!

My hospital adventure is still symbolic and literal to me in the most intimate of terms. It’s made me think often about the tremendous variety of reassurances the “dead” can choose to offer the “living.” A number of Jane’s readers have sent me communications they claim to have received for me from Jane in her after-death state. I’m making a collection of these for study. In the midst of my sorrowing for my wife, how did I — and how do I — know which of the communications are really from her? Or whether any portions of some of the messages may be? I soon learned that in each case I had to rely upon my own sensual and psychic equipment to intuitively know what to believe, or to be moved by, sometimes to the point of tears. Obviously, I can judge my feelings about what’s right and not right in my own experiences with a discarnate Jane much more easily than I can gauge the outside of someone else’s communication. But since I believe the Seth Material is valid, it would be very arrogant of me to think that none of Jane’s readers except me had legitimately tuned into her where she is now or perhaps touched upon her world view.

So if I insist that I’ve communicated with Jane at times, then I’m obligated to consider statements from others claiming the same thing. But in ordinary terms, even if my wife’s death has left me more open and vulnerable to psychic possibilities, I still shrink from offering any sort of blanket assurance. (“Yes, I’m convinced that you have reached Jane, just as I have.”) I’m not contradicting myself when I note that perhaps — and I’ve suspected for a long time that ultimately this is correct — it is true that on some far levels of consciousness and communication that we do not (or even cannot) understand at this “time,” each person who is so inclined to do so has at least touched a Jane who responded clearly enough. She will continue to do so. In this view, those elements in such messages that have no meaning for me can be only distortions on the part of the medium or the letter-writer or the poet. I do think that communication among entities, whether they’re physical or nonphysical, is always going on, and from every conceivable angle and in every way. Hardly a new thought, yet grasping it, or even speculating about it, is to touch upon a portion of the mystery of life. (And from where you are, Jane, what do you think of my very cautious approach?)

[...] Portions of it deal with camouflage patterns, with the personal past of the present personality, with racial memory. The greater portions of it are concerned with the inner world, and as data reaches it from the inner world, so can these portions of the subconscious reach far into the inner world itself…

[...] While part of the subconscious must deal with camouflage, for example, the deeper portions are in direct contact with the basic vitality of the universe. [...]

[...] The point remains, however, that man became so fascinated with it that he has ignored the parts of himself that make the ego possible, and he ignores those portions of himself that give to the ego the very powers of which he is so consciously proud. [...]

[...] Quite unknowingly, I set one side of myself — the intellectual — as a watchdog against the intuitive portions of the self. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

This portion of the personality translates inner data and sifts it through the subconscious, which is a barrier and also a threshold to the present personality. [...]

Some part of the individual is aware of the most minute portions of breath; some part knows immediately of the most minute particle of oxygen and other components that enter the lungs. [...]

[...] It is, however, a connective, a portion of the inner senses which we will call, for convenience, the second inner sense … It is a natural pathway, meant to give easy access from the inner to the outer world and back again.

I cannot say this too often — you are far more than the conscious mind, and the self which you do not admit is the portion that not only insures your own physical survival in the physical universe which it has made, but which is also the connective between yourself and inner reality. [...]

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

[...] 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.

This is the first of several key sessions included in this portion of the book as introductions to the interior universe. [...]