“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I’m tremendously pleased that Rick Stack, the proprietor of New Awareness Network Inc., is publishing the eight-to-ten-volume set of The Early Sessions. These books consist of the first 510 “sessions” that my wife, Jane Roberts, delivered for that well-known “energy personality essence”, Seth, after she began speaking in a trance or dissociated state in December 1963. They cover a six-year period between November 20,1963 and January 19,1970.

With the loving help of others I made several attempts over the years to publish various portions of Jane’s work, but with little success, for a variety of reasons. Also, even though I’d been so intimately involved with the Seth material from the very beginning, for example, I didn’t fully comprehend the volume of just the session material that we’d accumulated over a total of 21 years. Let alone the bulk of Jane’s other work: her poetry, novels both published and unpublished, her other published books, an unfinished autobiography, the records of her ESP class sessions, her journals and paintings, her singing in musical trance language, Sumari, her never-ending correspondence. My wife was—and is, I know, for I’m sure that she still lives—the most creative person I’ve ever met, and through her extraordinary abilities she’s left a body of work that I regard as a legacy of inquiry about our understanding of ourselves and our reality. In my opinion its “true value” is only now coming to be better acknowledged. Rick’s publication of The Early Sessions, then, is a very important advance in the marvelous journey of discovery that, I think, each one of us is inevitably involved in, that each one of us has chosen to create, in whatever way and for whatever purposes.

These eight to ten volumes are meant to show Jane’s and my growth—in the most literal way—but always that of my wife, above all else. From the start we felt that if our “psychic” work had value it should be presented as is, within all of its human connotations; not only its great successes, but with its gropings and mistakes, its questions and learnings along the way. Not edited or prettied up, but as is. Real. I still feel that way. These 510 sessions, then, are exact copies from the verbatim transcripts I made in my homemade shorthand while Jane spoke for Seth; I added notes and comments while typing the material after each session. Over half a dozen years we filed the typed sessions in 44 three-ring binders. The sessions in one of the volumes published by Rick are accompanied by my drawings of the objects used in the series of “envelope tests” we conducted, both for ourselves and long-range with a well-known scientist, over some 11 months.

I asked Rick to correct spelling, to delete the few notes I inserted in succeeding years, and to keep the presentation of the sessions uniform in the use of roman and italic types, punctuation, parentheses and brackets, dashes and hyphens, and so forth. This framework matches that in the already-published Seth books like Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality.

The Early Sessions are also very important for the sheer preservation and distribution of the Seth material. Many have asked about this, and I’m always conscious of it. The set is one more way to bypass the fragility of a lifework that’s so vulnerable on its brittle dimestore paper in those old binders. The Seth material is a long way from being on computer—if that ever happens—and relatively few readers will make the journey to Yale University Library, to study the collection of Jane’s and my papers that’s available there for anyone to see.

And Seth himself? Well, according to him that old guy has lived and died many times. He’s seen plenty and done a lot. He’s known many places on earth, and many loves as man and as woman, but I’ll bet that even now his experiences are still new, and that he reinforces Jane’s living feelings for each one of us. And thanks us for what he learns as much as we thank him.

They were taken 11 years apart. In the oval, she was 30 years old when she sat for my father, Robert F. Butts, Sr., in 1959. Jane and I had been married for four years. In the larger one, she was 41 years old when Rich Conz, a photographer for the Elmira Star-Gazette, took her picture in 1970, when she was in trance. By then Jane had been speaking for Seth for a little over six years.