“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(To me, both photographs had a certain mysterious quality that I’d often found intriguing — an aura due partly to their being old, personal, and so irreplaceable, I suppose. But for a long time I’d been aware of other feelings connected with them. Jane had begun delivering the Seth material late in 1963, and soon afterwards Seth started developing his ideas on probabilities.¹ Many times while looking at the snapshots since then I’d found myself speculating about the probable realities surrounding their two young subjects. I told Jane now that I understood the course of action each of us had chosen to make physical, or “real” in our terms. But what of all the other paths our probable selves had embarked upon since those pictures had been taken? By now, did those photographs actually depict the immature images of us, the Jane and Rob we knew and had always been, or from our standpoint did they show a probable Jane, a probable Rob — two individuals who long ago had set out upon their own journeys through other realities? I wasn’t clear on what I wanted to know, and had trouble expressing myself to Jane. Maybe I just wanted Seth to comment on probabilities in a more personal way. [And added later: At the time, I had no idea that my questioning would trigger a new Seth book.²]

Idea Construction did serve as a psychic trigger, however; it led Jane to her outline for How to Develop Your ESP Power (see Note 2 for Seth’s Preface in this book), then to the beginning of the Seth sessions two months later. “Enough energy was generated in that evening to change the direction of my life and my husband’s,” she wrote in Chapter 1 of The Seth Material. In that chapter she examines the experience in some detail, and gives excerpts from Idea Construction itself. In Seth Speaks, see her Introduction and Session 596 in the Appendix for further references to that original manuscript.

(The outward signs of Jane’s trance performances as Seth are very interesting in themselves, and I don’t intend to minimize them: indeed, I describe them every so often. My real fascination, however, lies with what I call the greatly enhanced consciousness, or energy, that she displays in the sessions — and always I sense an even more powerful flow of that quality just beneath the surface of her delivery. I thought of this as Jane sat quietly in her Kennedy rocker, waiting for Seth to come through. After a few minutes, her right hand lifted to her glasses. As she took them off her eyes were much darker and more luminous than they usually are: She was dissociated — in trance. Seth was there, staring at me.)

2. Indeed, Jane was to hold several sessions before we realized that Seth had begun a new book — see the 683rd session in this section. Seth had finished Personal Reality over six months ago. We suspended our regular sessions after that, yet were as busy as ever. My mother died in November, 1973. For some months we’d known her death was coming, and so had arranged our affairs around that irrevocable event; I spent weeks preparing the final manuscript of Personal Reality for the publisher; Jane conducted her ESP class whenever she could, and worked on her two books, Adventures in Consciousness and Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time. She also gave a number of private Seth sessions for the two of us on a variety of subjects. We ended up calling a portion of one of those the 678th session and added it to our records, since the material, which Jane received at my request, concerned probabilities and Jerusalem. We hope to publish it some day.

(Since Jane began delivering the Seth material, I’ve become more and more interested in questions about the origins of creative [meaning artistic] endeavors. [...] But, paradoxically, the origins aren’t to be found there, either, or grasped in regular terms, for according to Seth they’d lie outside the reach of physical life. Without going into Seth’s ideas that time is simultaneous, or that any endeavor is creative, the kinds of origins I’m discussing here wouldn’t have any beginning or end. [...]

[...] In this appendix I’ve put together some material on mysticism from Jane, Seth, and myself. [...] As events worked out, Seth was halfway through Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality before I realized that these supplementary notes would work well as the first appendix in the first volume. [...]

(“In fact,” she continued, “I’m embarrassed that Seth called me a mystic — a great one, I mean — like that. No matter whether it’s natural or not …” Rather reluctantly, she agreed to let me present that personal material here; but only, I think, because she understood my desire to give what I consider to be pertinent background material for the Seth books. [...]

(When Seth gave us this information, the sessions had barely started. Yet we could relate to it at once; in this instance especially Seth’s insights “fit” Jane’s conscious knowledge and extended it in most interesting ways.