“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

‘The glowing, very beautiful and alive grass also represents Jane’s new reality. The bridge arching over the lawn symbolizes another connective between that universe and my physical one. Jane doesn’t ask me to cross the bridge now. I think that the structure also stands for the ‘psychological bridge’ upon which she met Seth during her sessions with him. (Seth wasn’t in this experience, however.)

(See the considerable world-view material from Jane and from Seth in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. A world view is the body of an individual’s personalized interpretation of the physical universe; emotions are necessarily involved. “Each person has such a world view,” Seth tells us in Session 718, “whether living or dead in your terms, and that ‘living picture’ exists despite time or space. It can be perceived by others.”)

The session continued. [...] He was to attend many other sessions. [...] Some excellent evidential material was to be obtained through sessions with Mark several years later. [...]

It was Session 28, February 24, 1964 and our second session without the board. Seth was right; I had grown anxious wondering just when to dispense with it in a session and let him speak, yet it represented something solid and real that helped the transition take place. [...]

I was going to mention the furniture arrangements that we embarked upon during this time but find that a few excerpts from this same session give a pretty fair picture. [...] We’d been in the apartment three years when the sessions began, yet in a few session comments Seth managed to clear up several points that we had had never settled.

[...] I was half reluctant to hold a session and half curious as to how Seth would handle other people. [...] The session was actually a breakthrough in many respects, as these excerpts will show. [...]

I was really quite tired, yet after the session, I was astonished to discover that Seth had dictated an excellent exposition on the physical senses and had begun a description of the inner ones. [...] This was the twentieth session, January 29th. The session began as usual at 9:00 P.M. and ended at 11:40. [...]

(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. [...] The session was a long one, and he began by emphasizing the fact that all physical sense data was camouflage.)

And gain before the next session, I had that odd stage fright, a feeling of apprehension and wonder. [...] It seemed I had to rush through dinner and the dishes and my normal chores in order to get through by session time. [...]

More on Mental Enzymes
Excerpts from Sessions 19 and 20

I had only begun speaking for Seth a few sessions earlier. Before the eighth session, all replies came through the board. [...] The session was held on the evening of January 2, 1964 and lasted three hours. We locked the door and closed the blinds but always left the lights on for the sessions. [...] Here is a brief excerpt from that twelfth session:

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. [...] And it was in the middle of the eighth session that I began to speak for him. Almost from the beginning, however, I did anticipate what the board was going to “say,” and the poem is as valid as any strictly factual statement I could make about those sessions — if not more so.

In the meantime, we held our board sessions twice a week. [...] Often these sessions lasted until midnight. [...] Most of the first ten sessions dealt with reincarnation and included some fascinating material on Rob’s family.

[...] The assassination of JFK took place just after our sessions began. [...]

I wasn’t used to any messages from Seth when I was out of the house, and I’d been in the habit of discouraging any when I wasn’t having a session. [...] There was little need to stay, and again, it was a session night.

[...] Suppose I stopped having the sessions while I tried to figure things out, then decided that Seth was right on all counts — and found I just couldn’t have sessions again? [...]

[...] What difference could it make that we ever sat in this room, or had sessions, or moved furniture, or stroked the cat? [...]

So the first spring of the sessions came, a cold bright March. [...]

[...] Seth showed us in the next session that not only animals but all living things had their primary existence in this inner world. [...] In this session, he also spoke about the consciousness of trees in such a way that I was never able to look at the trees outside of my window with the same old detachment. Through the sessions, the whole world seemed to come alive.

The entire session ran three hours, and most of it was devoted to the ego and the subconscious and to their relationship to health and illness. While Rob’s back was vastly improved since Seth’s reincarnational sessions for him, he still had some bad days now and then. [...]

The largest segment of the session dealt with personal matters connected with Rob’s earlier illness. This led Rob to wonder what had caused our three animals to die shortly before the sessions began.

Following Seth’s suggestions, Rob began doing a few simple yoga exercises, and the night before the eighteenth session he used self-hypnosis to relax his muscles. [...] Seth began to comment on this in the beginning of the next session. [...]

In the next session, Seth told Rob that he was doing well and should try the exercise often. The session, the twenty-second, was one of our first spontaneous sessions. (At times, I knew I could have a session, for example, but mentally refused. Two sessions a week were more than sufficient, I thought — I was afraid of going into trance at the drop of a hat.)

Our regular session was due the next night and lasted, as usual, from 9:00 until after 11:30. I always want to give this particular session a title: “The Breather and the Dreamer,” because as a result of the session, I wrote a poem with that title — one of three poems inspired by Seth’s discussion that night. The session had quite a different effect on Rob, however, as you’ll see in the next chapter.

I just snorted when Rob told me about this data after the session. Still, the session impressed me. [...] After the session was over, it seemed to follow me out into the kitchen while I finished the dishes.

A Spontaneous Session and Some Answers
Excerpts from Sessions 22 and 23

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. As the session shows, Seth apparently decided that it was time to take me in hand. [...]

[...] I would much prefer more broken-up sessions if they are necessary, than sessions in which I see myself as a torture master.

As a result of the following sessions, for instance, we began “testing” physical reality for its subjective yields. [...] We tried to experience it differently, particularly after the nineteenth session and an experiment in self-hypnosis that Rob tried on his own.

5
Excerpts from Sessions 15 and 16

She is always slightly dubious and doubtful before a session … since she is the one through whom I speak. [...] Usually in our sessions, one inner sense is in strong operation. [...] This is our twenty-fourth session, and I am still trying to give you the answers.

By now, the sessions were running from seventeen to twenty typed, double-spaced pages and they lasted anywhere from two and a half to three hours. [...] Rob really had a great time, though, for the twenty-fifth session he didn’t have to take notes while we tried out the recorder. [...] He congratulated us on our “twenty-fifth anniversary,” and said jokingly, You will be much older by the time I am through with you. Most of the session was a discussion of ordinary subjective states emphasizing the fact that these could not be pinpointed in a laboratory or understood simply by the use of the ordinary scientific method. [...]

More About Psychological Time
and How to Use It
Excerpts From Sessions 24, 27 and 28
Miss Cummingham and a Missed Session

Through all of these early sessions, Rob was not feeling well. [...] The session notes show his condition quite clearly, though. [...]