“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 8:30 this evening I finished typing Monday’s short session [for the 8th]. I’d forgotten to do it last night, so absorbed was I in working on the copy-edited Mass Events. Then I made a surprising discovery as I put the session in private notebook number 23 — for there I found my original shorthand notes for the September 3 session. I’d also forgotten to type that one, and for the same reason, evidently. I believe that’s the first time in well over a thousand sessions that I’ve forgotten to type one. I’ve deliberately let a few go for a while because I was busy on other things, but haven’t simply forgotten any. Jane missed the September 3 session, but when she asked me about it a few days ago I replied that I was up to date. I remember wondering why she asked. …

(Once again Jane was very relaxed as we prepared for the session. “I could go to bed right now,” she said, “but it’s too early — I’d be getting up all night. Right now I don’t feel Seth around, though, but we’ll see … My spine’s got all kinds of feelings in it that I’m not used to, but they’re good ones. How does Seth sit? I’m not sitting too well. I felt just great in bed this afternoon. There’s a real fluid feeling there and in my back. But I feel him around now. …” She sipped wine while I worked on these notes.

You might combat those beliefs, struggle against them, but they still carried great weight. You still believed them to an important degree. The entire idea, or fear, that Ruburt had at one time of leading other people down the garden path, was based upon those old beliefs. Those ideas have vanished. You are approaching a state of mind, individually and jointly, that represents far more closely one that is natural, with which the natural person is innately equipped.

Education in your culture is a mixed bag (with ironic and humorous emphasis) — and education comes not from schools alone, but from newspapers and television, magazines and books, from art and from culture’s own feedback. Generally speaking, for the purposes of this discussion, there are two kinds of education — one focused toward teaching the child to deal with the natural world, and one focused toward teaching the child how to deal with the cultural world. Obviously, these are usually combined. It is impossible to separate them.

The sessions brought about, however, a new kind of education that often seemed in direct conflict with the old, and with the official views of contemporary society. It was of course necessary for you to test them out. Ruburt felt himself more responsible than you, since he spoke the words for me. A private search was one thing — but one publicly followed was something else (intently).

Whether or not the sessions happened as they did, however, once the two of you met, the probability brought about by your relationship meant that in one way or another you would seek out a larger context of consciousness — a context, because of your talents, that would not remain private, but attract others (intently).

Ruburt instinctively likes your tree painting. It represents a certain state of consciousness — an in-between threshold dimension of awareness, in which the imagination and the senses are almost caught in the act of putting an object together, or of bringing the world into a sensed reality, brand-new, from the realm of the inner mind: a very evocative state of consciousness, and one that as I believe Ruburt mentioned, you could also use in connection with faces.