“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I’m sure that that “energy personality essence,” as Seth calls himself, regarded with some amusement our gropings about how best to publish his work as the sessions began to pile up. I think that basically he was unconcerned with ideas of length or time; that Jane’s and my own willingness to continue delivering and recording the body of the material were the true arbiters of its length. In that sense, then, the creative processes involved with these two volumes were endless — at least until Jane and I called a halt to them for sheer physical reasons. (Those processes are still without end, of course, as is all creativity.)

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.

And Jane’s intent and mine, too. Jane’s books are records of her use of certain abilities that we think are very creative; the questions she raises present us with larger fields to investigate. Ordinarily we don’t think of those questions — and challenges — as being mystical in origin, not from our Western social viewpoint. Seth discusses Jane’s early religious background, her “deeply mystical nature,” in the first session of this volume (the 679th), and I add some material on mysticism in an appendix to that session. That information is related to these introductory notes, yet it should be separate.