“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(On Wednesday, March 27, we received from Jane’s publisher the page proofs for Seth’s second book, The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book.¹ No session was held that night. Actually, correcting the proofs — carefully scrutinizing well over 500 printed pages word by word, checking and rechecking notes, spelling, punctuation, and so forth — kept us so busy that we suspended the next eight scheduled sessions, covering a period of 26 days. Ordinarily Seth would have used those sessions to deliver work on “Unknown” Reality. We disliked interrupting our creative rhythms in that fashion, although in the meantime Jane kept ESP class going as usual, coming through as Seth and as Sumari within that context. And we told ourselves that Seth was perfectly capable of resuming work on “Unknown” Reality whenever we were ready to do so, whether the time lapse involved one week or six months.

(On Friday morning March 29, I told Jane that sometime during the previous night I had awakened with the certain knowledge that I’d just finished having two dreams at once. I retained conscious memory of one of them for just a moment before it irrevocably faded. Neither Jane nor I remembered hearing of, or experiencing, what I’ll call double dreaming. I wrote an account of the phenomenon while wondering if I’d distorted some quite ordinary dream happening — and while knowing at the same time that I hadn’t. I decided to ask Seth to discuss the two dreams when we went back to having sessions again, then forgot about them until I got around to rereading my first rough version of these notes last week. [When Seth discusses my “dreams” in this session, however, it turns out that from his perspective he’s able to be more accurate about labeling them than I was.]

I wrote in the Introductory Notes that I thought Jane’s speed in producing the Seth material was “a close physical approach to, or translation of, Seth’s idea that basically all exists at once — that really there is no time …” I’ll add here that the phenomenon of double dreaming can be another way of approximating the idea of simultaneous time (or lives), about which we as physical creatures always have so many questions.

5. Seth’s first use of “species of consciousness” came after 11:38 in the last session. And added later: He comes up with another evocative phrase, “civilizations of the psyche,” in the 715th session in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. Much of that session can be taken as an extension of his material here on the qualities of consciousness that have existed on the earth. In the 715th session, Seth also lets fall some rather humorous comments on Jane’s own mixed reactions when she first encountered such hints of the “multidimensionality of your beings.”

[...] And Seth, very briefly commenting upon the search while it was still in progress, remarked to an out-of-town group of visitors that Jane was endeavoring to use her psychic abilities on her own; and that the assurance she was gaining through her efforts would be much more valuable to her than any she might derive from Seth himself “doing all the work.”

[...] Within some personal material we received following the 694th session for May 1, 1974, Seth said in part:)

[...] He fears for the gullibility of people, and is rightly appalled at their superstitions — as you are, Joseph (as Seth calls me). [...]

(Seth continued:) He also began to see two poles in society one highly conventional and closed, in which he would appear as a charlatan; and another, yearning but gullible, willing to believe anything if only it offered hope, in which his activities would be misinterpreted, and to him [would be] fraudulent … There was a middle ground that he would have to make for himself … to make a bridge to those intellectuals who doubted, and yet maintain some freedom and spontaneity in order to reach those at the other end. [...]