“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.

I wrote Valerie that she was gifted psychically and suggested that she might cautiously proceed with learning more about her abilities, to whatever extent she chose. Valerie is thirty-eight years old, and lives with her husband in a western state; they have two children. She works part time in the field of education. She is developing her gifts through study and practice. During the year she sent me a number of messages “from” and about Jane. Some of them subjectively feel right to me; they effortlessly mirror or echo the way the Jane I lived with for almost thirty years often talked and wrote. In fact, at times I found the similarities between the contents of those messages and my ideas of Jane’s own ambience to be striking.

Valerie’s material raises as many questions as it gives answers for, of course. Are her messages really from Jane, or is she “only” telepathically picking up from me what I want to hear, and flashing it back to me from her trance states — as communications from Jane? An unbelieving scientist would say that Valerie is hardly in touch with a discarnate Jane, since science doesn’t accept survival of death. Nor would the idea of reaching Jane’s world view be considered, or telepathy from me, for both of those concepts are scientifically unacceptable. The most parsimonious view — the simplest, stingiest one — would be that through studying the Seth Material Valerie subconsciously divines the replies I want from my dead wife, and in all subjective innocence comes through with her trance messages for me, to fit my own stubborn belief in Jane’s survival.

Now, in a deep trance the subject, though fully aware of what is happening in the trance, may remember nothing of it afterward. The awareness of plant life is also somewhat like that of the subject in deep trance. [...] But like the trance subject, our plant is aware. [...]

Incidentally, while we are on the subject, often when you thought you were dealing with a matter or a person in a dissociated manner, you were instead exhibiting a cold, conscious detatchment. [...]

“The material was all on related subjects,” Rob said. [...]

[...] Rob saw, much more clearly than I did, the connection between psychic experience and my poetry and earlier subjective experience.

[...] The friends present had no idea we were involved in any psychic work, and the subject never came up in our conversation. [...]

[...] I had the odd feeling that the sensation was related both to the subject of conversation, and to some kind of message or communication I felt within me.

[...] 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. [...]

Then, just as Rob was about to ask how we could really perceive the inner realities, Seth began to discuss the second inner sense, giving us a valuable tool for our subjective dissections. [...]

As a result of the following sessions, for instance, we began “testing” physical reality for its subjective yields. [...]