“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

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.

But also, in my own book I’d want to write about my second marriage. Laurel Lee Davies, a native of Iowa, wrote to me from California after Jane’s death in September 1984, She was 29, I was 65. After months of letters and telephone calls we met in Elmira, and kept on developing the intuitive and loving relationship we had already begun. With our strong beliefs in the Seth material our ages and temperamental differences don’t seem to matter all that much. Laurel has been a marvelous help to me for all of the years we’ve been together, just as I’ve tried to help her. I’ve often thought, and hesitantly told her, that I think she saved me after Jane’s passing. And I add that Laurel and I were married at our home on Pinnacle Road in Elmira at 9:30 PM on December 31, 1999 - just in time for the new millennium.

Sayre, a community of about 7500, only 20 miles from Elmira and just across the Pennsylvania border, is my hometown. It’s loaded with memories for me. Jane and I also spent the first four years of our marriage here, before moving to Elmira in 1960. Laurel and I bought the house in Sayre, just around the corner from the house I grew up in, to get more living and working room. Now each time we make the beautiful drive to Elmira, it’s like moving back in time—just like it used to be when we traveled from Elmira to Sayre. And I speculate that Jane and Seth watch Laurel and me with much amusement now as we manipulate that quality called “time” on our journeys back and forth between the two houses…