“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The idea, then, of the novel came from past and future events, though you were to catch up with those future events very quickly. Your mind intuitively organized all of that material, and put it together in a completely new fashion. Sometimes when such events occur, the precognitive trigger is not even recognized when it is encountered physically, because it happens too far ahead of time. (To me:) You organize mental and physical events in a creative manner. In this case a novel was involved because the concept, while strongly involving images, carried a time span that would make narrative necessary.

This will be a very brief session. When you look at world events, however, the present world situation for example (the war between Iraq and Iran, which began a few days ago), try to enlarge the scope of your intellectual reach, so that you consider world events as living multidimensional “novels” being formed in the present in response to both future and past triggers. The impact of the future on the past, in your terms — or rather, the implications of the future on the present — are highly important, and such precognitive reactions are as vital, numerous, and real as you ordinarily think that the reactions to past events are (intently).

This puts present world events in an entirely different perspective. Men act, then, in relationship to events that have, historically speaking, not yet occurred — but those events happening, say, in the future, in certain terms cast their shadows back into the present, or illuminate the past according to the events’ characteristics. There is always more going on than ordinary sense data show.

The same occurs, of course, in all areas of human behavior, as well as in the behavior of animals and even of plants. This future shadowing the present, or future illuminating the present, represents a vital element in the formation of events as they are perceived in time. In a fashion the triplets were reacting in their past to a future event that has now caught up with them, so that each of their actions in any moment of that past happened as a result of a tension — a creative tension — between the event of their original separation and the event of their future reunion.

I think that the idea of mixups in the hospital came from a book Jane and I have been reading the past week, written by a doctor who warns against medicine, delivery rooms, the whole bit, in the establishment practice of medicine. He wrote that such baby mixups are far from rare. Then as we sat on the couch, I remembered that for the first time in literally months I’d forgotten to bring in the evening paper, so we could look at it while we ate and watched TV. I almost invariably bring in the paper before I lay down for a nap before supper, so Jane can read it while I sleep.