“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

My feelings “clicked;” the incident was significant; and it seemed to fit in too perfectly and meaningfully into the events just previous, as if saying “yes, you do operate magically” … and this is an example of how those perceptions work. If Rob hadn’t come in at that point, I wouldn’t have known that my thought about cameras had anything to do with his thoughts or activities at the same time. So how often do our thoughts relate in one way or another to the thoughts of others?³

1. Jane Roberts writes in The God of Jane: “Since late 1963, I’ve clocked approximately 4,000 hours of trancetime, during which the Seth sessions have been held twice weekly. … My trancetime is more concentrated than regular time. I’m not unconscious but conscious in a different way, at another level … This state of perception has nothing to do with classical pathological dissociation; and its products — Seth’s five books — display a highly-developed intellect at work and give evidence of a special kind of creativity. In those trance hours I ‘turn into someone else.’ At least I am not myself to myself; I become Seth, or a part of what Seth is. I don’t feel ‘possessed’ or ‘invaded’ during sessions. I don’t feel that some superspirit has ‘taken over’ my body. Instead it’s as if I’m practicing some precise psychological art, one that is ancient and poorly understood in our culture; or as if I’m learning a psychological science that helps me map the contours of consciousness itself … after all this time, I’m finally examining the trance view of reality and comparing it to the official views of science and religion. …

Jane had been speaking for Seth for six years when she posed for me. I don’t regard my unsigned effort as being a finished work. It was just the best I could do at the time.