“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“I wish there were words to use besides clairvoyance or precognition,” I said, since I was somewhat reluctant to attach them to the newspaper experience. That is, at the time I hadn’t had any feeling that those qualities or terms might apply to what I’d sensed — nor do I now. Perhaps I was merely afraid the experience wasn’t clairvoyant, I said, yet I felt our vocabulary was limited in some indefinable way in such cases. A copy of my newspaper experience is attached to this session.¹

In your terms, whether a minute or 10 minutes, or an hour or two hours were involved, you reacted ahead of time to a headline that you had not as yet physically encountered. You reacted creatively, using the precognitive story as a basis for a fictional endeavor. You turned it to art’s purposes.

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.

In your comparatively simple experience, you can see, however, the implications of such activities. Men may react to future events by unconsciously translating them into art, or motion pictures. They may react by unconsciously taking certain steps of a political nature that seem at the time either unreasonable, or even incomprehensible — steps whose logic appears only in hindsight.

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.

The usual answer, or the usual method of obtaining an answer, was at the time inconvenient: You were not about to get up, go outside and get the paper, so on its own the intellect pressed the magical-approach button, you might say, getting the information the quickest and easiest way possible.

(I intend to copy a page or two of the session to insert in my notebook containing suggestions of notes for Dreams, Seth’s latest book. I mean the material about time. I also thought we should somehow keep the session in mind, and not let it get lost in the files as the years pass — one of the reasons I want to use part of it in Dreams. Since it’s private, it might not be published any time soon otherwise.

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.