“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

July 6, 2000. It’s with much feeling indeed that I try to write briefly about the 16 private or “deleted” Seth sessions, ranging from numbers 367 to 387, that aren’t included in this Volume 8 of The Early Sessions. This is the first group of full-length sessions to be omitted in all of the volumes of The Early Sessions so far. Jane held only five “regular” or public sessions while delivering this large group, and those five are presented in Volume 8.

For the most part over the six years and 510 sessions covered in The Early Sessions, from December 2, 1963 to January19, 1970, Jane spoke for Seth in her own creative yet also objective manner. A way that, although still very emotional at times, allowed us the freedom to encompass this most unusual and continuing adventure in as easy and conventional a manner as possible. Unusual? Yes. Surely her intuitively-chosen manner helped us acclimate to the highly original and creative fact that Jane was learning to speak in a dissociated (or trance) state for Seth, a disembodied worthy who called himself an “energy personality essence.” (I’ll bet that he still does, 16 of our time-bound years after Jane’s death!) Jane’s method was her very individualistic way of developing her great, yet consciously unsuspected powers.

In 10 of the sessions between the numbers 314 and 325 in Volume 7 we see how, with Jane’s need and consent, Seth was reaching into deeper, more penetrating material involving her conscious and unconscious lives. And mine, too! (I’m correcting the page proofs for Volume 7 now.) We had never called those sessions in Volume 7 deleted, though, and I’m happy now to trust that they may help readers gain insight into some of their own challenges. We deeply appreciated Seth’s insights and suggestions about Jane’s and my visible and invisible psyches, the challenges we had chosen to create for ourselves in our present lifetimes. With the publication of Volumes 7 and 8 I’d like to hear from readers about benefits they may have derived from experimenting with Seth’s ideas. The two volumes are to be published at the same time in 2001 by Rick Stack, the proprietor of New Awareness Network, Inc. Rick has of course published the first six volumes of The Early Sessions.

Not that those personal sessions in Volume 7 represent the beginnings of Seth’s efforts—always with Jane’s and my permission, indeed encouragement—to offer his understandings of our challenges. Such material began to come through the Ouija board as mostly reincarnational data way back in the second session, for December 4, 1963. See Volume I of The Early Sessions. (Only then a personality fragment of Seth’s, named Frank Watts, was speaking to us. Seth himself didn’t announce his presence to us most definitely until December 8, in the fourth session. I deleted some of his early information for us from Volume I.)

Seth’s personal material was startling in its unexpected clarity, although always quite brief. We didn’t push for details. How could we? We didn’t know enough to do so, for in ordinary terms we had no way to anticipate the breadth, the depth, of the material Jane and Seth were to produce. Sometimes in those early sessions Seth would mention a current relative or friend of one or the other of us—or both of us—as being involved in our personal material. Sometimes he mentioned reincarnational relationships or heritages—again, briefly.

Anyhow, the deleted material from the very beginning is now due to be published. As soon as Rick Stack finishes publishing The Early Sessions (probably with Volume 9, it seems at this time), we plan to launch the Personal Sessions series. Actual title and number of volumes unknown at present. I’m proud to be involved in this work with Rick and his wife, Anne Marie O’Farrell, who is my literary agent. Their long-term commitment is all important.

For some years Jane and I devoted much work to learning the processes detailed in all of those early unpublished sessions, which were followed by her series of published books like The Seth Material, Seth Speaks, The Nature of Personal Reality, and so on. My wife’s later deleted material even contains a complete and unpublished book that she delivered just for me, about the artist Rembrandt van Rijn. Page by page, Jane presented her gift to me during the last year of her life, when she was hospitalized. I’m going to be most interested in the responses of others to Seth’s book about that highly creative and world-famous individual. I already know that it’s good!

How long would it take to publish all of those categories? I don’t know who would have the patience to read them, but I’d really like to see all of them out there, on the record. Part of the Collection, as I call it, is already available at the Yale University Library, but how many have the time to visit there? Of course, I can always indulge my secret desire and write my own book about Jane and me. All I’d need is the “time” to do that while overseeing the projects already listed. The book would include Jane’s simplistically beautiful and brilliantly colored art; also my own quite different art—especially those drawings and paintings of and from my dreams that began to blossom as Seth discussed his dream material. Some of his work is presented in The Early Sessions. In all modesty, I think that my art and its subject matter are unique; that for each one of us dreams are an original and unending source of inspiration and knowledge.