“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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!

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.

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