“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]

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.

6. It took more than a little while for Jane’s mystical nature to show itself in prose. Two years after we married, she published her first work of fiction, a short story about reincarnation called “The Red Wagon”: It appeared in the December, 1956, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [© 1956 by Fantasy House, Inc., New York, N.Y.]. She was 27 years old, and most pleased with the beginning of her professional career. Within the next several years she sold a number of additional stories to the same magazine, as well as two short novels, and also published poetry and a little fiction in other markets.

Seth has discussed the members of the Butts family at times, including some of their reincarnational aspects. Six months before starting “Unknown” Reality, however, he made a few remarks that I’ve applied ever since to life in our physical reality: “Each person chooses his or her parents, accepting in terms of environment and heredity a bank of characteristics, attitudes, and abilities from which to draw in physical life. There is always a reason, and so each parent will represent to each child an unspeakable symbol, and often the two parents will represent glaring contrasts and different probabilities, so that the child can compare and contrast divergent realities … Your two brothers also chose the family situation. Each parent [both of whom are now deceased] represented opposites to them — but individual ones, and so they saw your parents differently [than you did]. Do not lose contact with them….”

[...] To some extent he replaced the father she’d lost at the age of two when her parents were divorced. [...]

[...] Just two years later, she wrote the following poem.

[...] From two perspectives she rather briefly describes one such episode, which actually lasted several hours, in her Dialogues, and in Adventures in Consciousness.⁵

Two years later, while working on Chapter 22 of Psychic Politics, Jane herself wrote: “No one has really tried to map the natural contours of the psyche. [...]