“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As Seth I’ve produced five previous books: Seth Speaks; The Nature of Personal Reality; The “Unknown” Reality, Volumes I and II; The Nature of the Psyche; and The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, and Seth is halfway through a sixth book: Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment. These beside my own twelve books. Seth doesn’t answer mail though, or do any typing, and so as a result of those trance hours Rob and I spend a good deal of our conscious energy dealing one way or another with the effects of that trance life.

In the summer of 1980 I missed Seth sessions for nearly two months. I was finishing work on one of my own books, The God of Jane. Rob was preparing Seth’s The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events for publication. We were both caught up in the same events as most other people were during that June and July — the hotter-than-usual nights and days, the drought in parts of New York State that touched our area lightly, the TV news drama as the political parties argued and planned for their conventions. Some nights the (singing) bugs in the small back woods were louder than the sound of our television set. The same heat that made me groan with dismay turned Rob into some version of a south-sea island native. He looked supercool in his cut-off denim shorts; his long hair curled into natural corkscrews, his light durable frame seeming to luxuriate in the heat while my light durable frame turned into a sponge that added ten pounds of fatigue.

I was between projects after The God of Jane. In the meantime I’d read over the 17 chapters of my unfinished novel, Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time, and looked over groups of notes for possible books, but nothing hit the spot. I asked for some ideas from my “natural spontaneous self,” and on August 5, 1980, I dreamed that a moving van with me in it was itself being moved by a larger vehicle ahead of some planned time. There was a squabble over seating arrangements which was finally resolved. I took that to mean that I would shortly be on the move again creatively, and to be prepared, so I had Rob help me move all my writing materials from the small breezeway where I’d finished The God of Jane, into the new patio back room, as a gesture of being ready to start over.

Magic as we call it represents (reflects) a basic part of our natural heritage … We permit distorted versions of the psyche’s attributes — clairvoyant, telepathic, and precognitive abilities — which surface as magic.²

Rob’s notes helped me realize that all of this wasn’t as alien as it usually seems. The magical orientation might be in direct conflict with our training in this and most present cultures. But it would be part of our natural way of looking at the world — a way that has been overlaid by our belief in the “rational” way of doing things. That way was proving to be not so rational at all, incidently. But I thought there would be things in each person’s life that could be used as guideposts, to a magical kind of orientation. …