“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.

After Jane’s death I became extremely busy. I had to cope with my grief, and one way I chose was to immediately begin keeping elaborate records in and writing essays for a series of “grief notebooks.” I told no one about the notebooks, or the three drawings I had made of Jane as she lay in her bed right after her death. I was obligated to spend many months finishing a Seth book — Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment — that we had started way back in September 1979, long before she went into the hospital; as I had planned to, I resumed work on that project the day after she died. (Jane was cremated the next day, in a process we had agreed upon several years ago.) I also worked upon two other books we collaborated upon after she had been hospitalized. There were many legal matters to attend to, much mail to answer, and more to keep up with.

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!

Why do we have jobs at a hospital, when Jane was so afraid of them while she was physical? I interpret our employment there, and her joyful mood, to mean that from where she is now she no longer fears hospitals and the medical establishment — that she’s moved beyond that deep apprehension she began to build up around the age of three, as her mother became gradually, and permanently, incapacitated with rheumatoid arthritis. I think that my own much more pleasant earlier experiences with the hospital in Sayre, including my doing free-lance art work for some of its doctors, helped me place the locale for this adventure there, rather than at the hospital in Elmira, where Jane died. In addition, we lived very happily in Sayre for several years following our marriage.

[...] The session was held on the evening of January 2, 1964 and lasted three hours. [...]

“Three doors away.”

“She … she lived three doors down the street, in a dark front room. [...]

[...] It was fewer than three hundred people, on the northeast coast of England. [...]

[...] He was thirty-three at the time and had been caught in an act of, shall we say, indiscretion, for which he was severely and unjustly beaten. [...]

[...] Our living room is very large — opens from the apartment house hallway and runs down to three large bay windows at the other end. [...]

About three weeks previously, Rob had written to a psychologist interested in reincarnation. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] We hadn’t even told our families.) In the middle of that innocuous evening, Rob suddenly had three experiences that were quite startling at the time and rather frightening. [...]

On the evening of Saturday, February 8, 1964, I had three separate and very strange sensations. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] If, in a dream, you experience a period of three days, physically you do not age for these days. [...]

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. [...]

[...] This led Rob to wonder what had caused our three animals to die shortly before the sessions began.

[...] Where had the extra energy come from … after three hours of dictation as Seth? [...]

[...] Because of our past alliances, the three of us are closely bound together …

[...] It was a terrific change for me to suddenly have to rely on someone else — even Rob — to tell me what “I” had been saying for a period of two or three hours.

[...] 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. [...]