“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I started the first rough draft for these notes on April 16, 1975. Although they bear my name, before I was finished with them I’d had plenty of help from my wife, Jane Roberts, and from Seth, the nonphysical entity who speaks through her while she’s in trance. In fact, Jane and Seth are the ones who so beautifully bring these notes to their conclusion; and in that order — Jane with some excellent material about her relationship with Seth, and Seth himself with his new letter to correspondents. Yet Jane isn’t particularly turned on by dates, session numbers, information about footnotes, and some of the other material I’ll be discussing here.

Seth began dictating The “Unknown” Reality: A Seth Book, in the 679th session for February 4, 1974, and finished it with the 744th session for April 23, 1975. In the beginning we anticipated another intriguing Seth book, the successor to Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality. We thought the new work would probably be a long one, but we hardly expected that it would require publication in two volumes.

The firm decision to do this was made when we were visited by Jane’s editor at Prentice-Hall, Tam Mossman, and a business colleague who accompanied him. By then it was obvious that in a couple of weeks Seth would be through with “Unknown” Reality, as we’d taken to calling it. For some time all of us present had been aware that as a single volume this new work would be more massive than we wanted it to be. Jane and I were really pleased, then, to get the official word. Not only would the expanded format be something out of the ordinary in itself, but it meant that with two volumes I’d have the room I needed for notes and references; excerpts from Jane’s ESP class sessions, as well as from “regular” sessions dated before and after the production time of “Unknown” Reality; a little of Jane’s poetry; and appendixes — all of which I thought would add extra dimensions of consciousness to the books. (And, of course, I couldn’t begin these notes until such a decision had been made.)

Once before (in January, 1973), Seth dictated a letter for us to send to those who wrote, and it can be found in the 633rd session in Chapter 8 of Personal Reality. Many people liked that letter (they still do) — and some wrote back in response to it! Because of this, Jane and I suggest that Seth’s earlier letter be read in conjunction with the one below, for as Jane says, the two complement and reinforce each other. We feel that both messages from Seth reflect much of the essence of his material, and our own circumstances and attitudes surrounding its production. Certainly we think that presenting Seth’s new letter here makes an ideal way to conclude these notes. (Seth refers to Jane by her male entity name, Ruburt; and to me as Joseph, for the same reason.)