“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Yet every so often in this series I’ll be including sessions that are also of more outgoing subject matter—more like the sessions in Jane’s published Seth books. Later volumes of The Personal Sessions will also include a whole book that Jane delivered for me on the great l7th-Century Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. This book has never been published. It’s not a Seth book, but one of the three “world view” books from highly creative people in the arts that Jane tuned into on her own as gifts for me. The other two are The World View of Paul Cézanne (1977), and The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James (1978). When we get to the Rembrandt material in this series I’ll offer my interpretation of Jane’s very interesting world-view material.

My goal, then, has come to be the publishing of all of Jane’s work, or at least as much of it as I can, including not only the Seth material but her poetry and fiction and notes and journals—to finally be able to offer it as a great whole for study in what we call the “future.” For if all of a person’s lifework isn’t known, how can its true worth in all of its human complexity ultimately be known? Sometimes I think I’m a slow learner: It took me a while to realize, for example, that the responses to the Seth material by mail and in person—and now electronically—are actually myriad extensions of that work, showing in all of their varieties the questions and answers it’s raised and the beneficial effects it’s had on the many who have communicated since Jane held her first real session on December 2, 1963—and on those who still do. The mail in any form is great! Seldom does a day go by that I don’t answer letters. I’m glad to do it, even when I fall far behind.

I do want to record that while we took great comfort in receiving the mail, we also came to receive through it an additional and totally unexpected gift—one that literally we would never have asked for even if we had thought of it. Maude Cardwell, an older Seth reader in Austin, Texas, had for several years been publishing a modest monthly journal on the Seth material that she called Reality Change. When I wrote her about Jane’s latest hospitalization Maude, without mentioning her idea to me, suggested to her readers that donations would help Jane and me cope with our hospital bills. I would have never had the nerve to make such a statement. St. Joe’s, as we called the hospital, had never dunned us for money in the past, and wasn’t doing so now. Our considerable daily charges were mounting, but we had emotionally pushed their import into the background. I was able to make modest payments out of royalty income I had been saving, but this was difficult to keep up because most of that money was paid to us but twice a year. Imagine, then, our great surprise when the readers of Reality Change began to contribute: small checks; medium checks; the occasional larger check. I have every one of those letters and my heartfelt answers in a separate file that I plan to add as a unit to the collection of Jane’s and my work in the archives of Yale University Library.

Our guests, with others who didn’t make the trip to Sayre, had been visiting the collection of the Seth material in the archives of Yale University Library in New Haven, CT. The archives contain a complete copy of my original typed pages of the Seth material in its 46 three-ring binders; many editions of the Seth books and Jane’s “own” books in English and in translations; her published and unpublished novels; her journals and poetry; her notes and papers, and mine; various published Seth journals; treatises and websites on the Internet (some nice, some not so nice); plus other relevant, indeed very evocative material like the reader correspondence from this country and abroad. I’m still adding to the collection. It’s open to the public.