“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(These notes will recapitulate two rather surprising events. While we were having last Saturday’s session, someone knocked on our door; I didn’t answer it and they left. Sunday they returned: Rusty and Dr. Hal from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on their yearly visit to us with a cheesecake. As the four of us talked for an hour or so two things emerged. Dr. Hal had a teacher many years ago, a woman, who used to walk with William James; indeed, he read part of his Varieties of Religious Experience to her. James also discussed his own psychic experiences with this woman. Hal told us her name but we forgot to note it down. Interesting, that this information would come to us just as Jane is preparing her James manuscript for Prentice.

(The encounter with the Canadian couple was so recent that as we sat for the session it hadn’t occurred to Jane and me to hope that Seth would discuss the affair, or to even ask that he do so. I was impressed by the meeting on the street, but equally taken with the fact that Hal had known someone who’d known James. Strangely, in all of this the meeting of Rusty and the president of Prentice-Hall hadn’t registered as strongly with us, though we recognized that it could be an event originating in Framework 2. Oh yes—the president is involved with Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship, which may have been his motivation for attending Rusty’s talk to begin with.)

Remember—you two were involved, with your probabilities and free will. Until Ruburt was at his desk this evening, he did not finally decide whether or not he would greet the strangers you knew had earlier tried to reach you. He played with the idea of checking some notes, and then taking his chapter (on James) to the living room table, and darkening his room. In that case, the young woman would still have met someone who had a connection with him.

In its own way, the James connection happened in the same fashion, for your desires and beliefs go out in all directions in time. Your context outlive your deaths. The particular connections here are too complicated to try to explain, but they do involve James’s intense interest during his life in the future of his own work, and in the state of the psychic field of the future.

In a manner of speaking, the gentleman’s (Hal) visit, while Ruburt is doing the James book, completes an intent on James’s part that he had in life. The event, again, in a way is even separate from Ruburt’s present connection with James, but followed as a result of James’s living curiosity regarding highly gifted mediums that might exist after his death.

Had he been living, he would have sought Ruburt out, you see, and they would have gotten along famously. You and James would also have been excellent friends. The three of you missed each other in time. In other frameworks, however, you are friends, hence Ruburt’s book, and your first attraction to James’s writings.

That James however is, of course, as he says the William James that he was —and yet is no more the same William James, as the child and the adult are one person and yet are not. Consciousness can be put together in many ways, and you use your own consciousness in ways that presently at least escape you, even though the results may be quite objective. The encounter and Miss Dineen and your friends, again, is a case in point. The meeting was real in your terms, yet the manipulations of consciousness behind it were largely unknown.

In those terms James is aware of the Hal connection. It is only because so many of the manipulations of your own consciousness are unknown to you in life that such issues appear odd.

You are indeed colleagues of James, and in a way the unconventional Doctor Hal carries out, in his own fashion, some of James’s living intents or questions.

Hal works more directly with the body. It is rather that he accepted some of James’s questions as he understood them through his teaching, and allowed these to merge with questions of his own. It is as if you hand on challenges or questions to others, which they accept for their own reasons, and hence follow through for you in areas in which you might be highly interested, even though in some cases they might have been sidelines in your own work.