“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Having this set published for the record is something I’ve long wanted to see take place, and Rick’s dedicated interest and time make it possible. (I told him more than once along the way that he’d better think twice—and more!— before taking on the job of publishing eight-to-ten books.) Jane died on September 5,1984, at the age of 55. When she was close to death she asked me to publish all of her work. In my grief and shock I agreed, without understanding what a challenge that labor of love was to entail. I’m still working at it 12 years later!

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 Let alone the bulk of Jane’s other work: her poetry, novels both published and unpublished, her other published books, an unfinished autobiography, the records of her ESP class sessions, her journals and paintings, her singing in musical trance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.

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.

I often think—like every day—that from “where she is now” in her larger reality, Jane must watch our all-too-human manipulations in this “physical” reality with great compassion and understanding, and probably with some amusement, too, as in our frantic days of living we try to get everything done. To do what we’re supposed to do as well as what we want to do, to finally get it all just right for our individual purposes.

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.

I want to thank so many for their help and reinforcement that it’s unbelievable. How do I thank all of those thousands and thousands who have written, let alone the millions who have bought books and told others about them? All have helped create the living psychic reality within which Jane’s and my work has been nurtured and grown. Our work is really dedicated to one and all, then. I love to hear from readers—even if it does take me forever to answer sometimes. No letter is ever unread or unappreciated. I’ve saved them all from the beginning. Eventually they’re added to the collection of our papers at Yale University Library, while not being open to the public for privacy’s sake.

Now let me list some of those I know personally, and who have helped Jane and her work so much: Tam Mossman, Richard Kendall and Suzanne Delisle, Sue Watkins, Debbie Harris, Laurel Davies, Janet Mills, Lynda Dahl and Stan Ulkowski, Bob Terrio, Norman Friedman, Jeff Marcus, Juan Schoch, Michael Goode. And oh, yes: Rick Stack and his wife, Anne Marie O’Farrell, who’s my literary agent. I don’t know what, if anything, I’d have accomplished in carrying out Jane’s wishes without the unstinting help Anne Marie has offered in so many ways.

So here’s to each one of us, willingly caught up as we are in the brilliance of this “now” even when we may think we’re not, exploring our individual and joint creation of reality in all of those uncountable variations that result in a seamless whole. Let’s keep doing just that. My wife, Jane Roberts, and I salute you!