“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.