“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Two events transpired today [Thursday, July 30] that Jane handled very well. Both involved communication with the public—a sense of responsibility—which we now know to be a source of constant tension for her. But when they were over I told her she responded well to them, and she seemed pleased that she’d taken positive actions re them through the telephone.

(One event concerned the telegram from attorney Thomas Bernier in Roseburg, Oregon. It arrived late this morning. When Jane called him the lawyer told Jane that his client was a 27-year-old schizophrenic who’d confessed to killing a certain woman he’d met in a Seth class both attended some years ago. He had confessed to her death several times, but no one believed him—until the last time, evidently. Now he was on trial. Jane didn’t ask for details on the case, but instead explained to the lawyer something of Seth’s ideas so that the attorney could use that material in his defense, making it clear that above all Seth was not for violence, even though the prosecuting attorney was evidently trying to make the defendant sound as though it was okay to kill because reincarnation was a fact: Since we all lived other lives, no one could really kill anyone. I sent Bernier a book list. Interestingly, in the small town of Roseburg he’d been able to buy James and Cézanne and ESP Power, but no other Seth books.

(The other event concerned a medium in Hollywood, California, who claims to be speaking for Seth, and who gave a well-advertised seminar at a Holiday Inn there. He’s been doing such speaking in trance since the early 1970’s. The literature a fan sent us last week made it seem that the medium claimed to be speaking for Jane’s Seth. More arrived today from the same fan—and the quotes given seemed like copycat material of Seth’s, down to calling himself an “energy-essence,” and so forth.

(Sometimes I’m slow, and other times even slower. I discussed these notes with Jane when I wrote them—Thursday, July 30—and our individual attitudes toward the mail in general, which is steadily increasing in volume. Then it came to me: The two events described here certainly did speak well for some kind of accomplishment on Jane’s part—and one greater than any she’d given herself credit for. For both events obviously involved effects her work was having in that outside world we shied away from: Seth, it seemed, had even managed to make his way into a court of law, the very fabric of our society; and regardless of whether he was praised or knocked, his ideas were “officially” discussed. And the medium, Thomas Massari, was basically spreading Seth’s ideas among the so-called leaders of at least segments of our society: M.D.’s, psychotherapists, and others in the medical field. Even if, as we thought likely, all was not strictly honest on the medium’s part.

(My thought of course is that gritting one’s teeth and plunging ahead with the new book in defiance of large portions of the personality may have unpleasant repercussions. I’m still shocked to realize that while I was laboring over Mass Events, and Jane was doing God of Jane, that those two books had stirred up even more resistance on the part of that personified Sinful Self, and that when they were finished we were then confronted with a new barrage of symptoms that ended up restricting [and protecting?] Jane’s physical manipulability even more. Not to say what’s happened to her spontaneous creative drives. A strange way indeed to achieve one’s goal, a strange bargain. Yet I try to accept Jane as she is and myself as well.)