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CONCERNING THE PRIVATE OR “DELETED” SESSIONS

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.

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.)

As the personal material began to unfold we started calling it the “deleted” material because we kept it separate from the more general “regular” or public sessions. After all, in the conventional sense what was one to do with personal material from whatever source but keep it personal? As the years passed after 1963 we acquired two sets of Seth material, then, one public, one private. It wasn’t until after Jane’s death in 1984 that I took the “time” to understand that Jane’s Seth material—her great passionate body of work—really didn’t need to be categorized as public or private—that all of it was simply one multifaceted creative entity.

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!

And so the unification of more facets of the Seth material continues. I trust that I’m offering enough intriguing hints in this essay to keep readers interested in pursuing Jane’s and Seth’s and my loving work. Apropos of that statement, what’s left after publishing the deleted sessions? Well, how about the transcripts in book form of the ESP classes Jane conducted from 1967 to 1978? Rick Stack was one of her students, with friends often making the weekly 400-mile-plus round trip from New York City to our apartment in upstate Elmira, NY. (And the members of that group had to be back in the city to go to work the next day! Jane and I used to marvel at their endurance.) Rick recorded and has produced many audio tapes of Jane and Seth speaking in those classes; at this time he’s also producing an additional group of tapes. Then there’s Jane’s business and personal correspondence; much of her poetry; her journals; her unfinished autobiography; several novels she wrote before publishing the three Oversoul Seven books; the later essays she dictated to me, while in the hospital, about Seven’s childhood; her family history as far back as it can be researched; an objective biography of her physical and creative lives including her two marriages, and Jane’s and my struggles to survive before the advent of the Seth material. And there could be more; there always seems to be more, I’m glad to note.