“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The appendix idea worked well in both The Seth Material and Seth Speaks. Here in “Unknown” Reality the individual excerpt or session in an appendix, with whatever notes it may have, is usually pretty complete in itself. These pieces can be read at any time, but I prefer that the reader go over each one when it’s first mentioned in a footnote, just as he or she ought to check out all other reference material in order throughout both volumes.

As I note in the Epilogue for this volume, Section 6 in Volume 2 contains the story of how we moved into our “hill house,” just outside Elmira, N.Y., a month before Seth completed that section — and his part in “Unknown” Reality as a whole — in April, 1975. But in October, 1974, long before our move from the two apartments we occupied in downtown Elmira, Jane started her Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book; that book is the sequel to Adventures in Consciousness, and is to be published this Fall (in 1976) by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Politics is also mentioned in the Epilogue to Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, and my first session notes on it show up in Section 4, in the second volume.

We’d intended to publish Volume 1 before Politics, but since Jane finished her book before I could complete the notes for the two Seth books (I found it necessary to do many of the notes for both volumes together), we decided to publish Politics first instead. Our move to the hill house also cost me considerable working time on the manuscripts. So it’s obvious, then, that Politics jumps ahead of “Unknown” Reality as far as a strictly correct publishing chronology is concerned.

In Politics Jane also refers to certain blocks of material that first appeared in “Unknown” Reality, so I’ve adjusted the appropriate notes in the latter to account for their earlier discussion. Intrinsically there’s no conflict between Jane’s latest and Seth’s latest, however. Each one enhances the other. I simply want to stress that our overall goal is the publication of Jane’s books (including those produced with Seth), and that each work is a complete entity while containing within itself the necessary references to others in the series.

I averaged 40 of the sessions, just the parts devoted to dictation, for two things: the time Jane spent in trance only, and her trance time plus relevant break times. I obtained figures of 1:39 and 2:02 hours respectively. Then I multiplied each of these by 65. I found the low results difficult to believe; they speak volumes (the pun is deliberate) about the great speed that creativity — at least Jane’s — can show under certain conditions. For she completed the two volumes of “Unknown” Reality in a total trance time of 90:35 hours, or a total trance-plus-break time of 131:30 hours (sums which translate roughly into times of 45 hours and 65 hours per book). Keep in mind that these figures result from averages, and that the remaining 25 sessions would yield very similar results, since they include no extremes of brevity or length. So either hourly total is most remarkable for the involved creative accomplishment of “Unknown” Reality, regardless of the larger context in which those hours were really expended. For comparison, think of one week as consisting of 168 hours.

Do I think that Jane, in trance, could actually deliver a complete, book-length manuscript in just 45 hours? The question must be hypothetical, but I’m sure she could as far as having Seth’s material available is concerned; she’d need only the necessary physical strength. Even now, while speaking for Seth she can easily outtalk my writing capacity by many hours. The information from Seth would be there. The work produced would be different from the “same” work delivered over a longer time. Seth wouldn’t have our current daily activities to draw upon for some of his analogies, for instance, but in such cases I think he’d either call upon similar episodes from our pasts, or cast his material in different ways — which would yield the same results.