“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The whole adventure has certainly been a learning experience, one demanding a kind of forbearance that neither Jane nor I could have really anticipated. If the waiting until I finished with Volume 2 has been difficult for me, it’s been doubly so for Jane, since by nature she’s much more spontaneous and quick than I am. Yet the wait itself was creative. As I show below, putting this Volume 2 together has represented a process of discovery for me — just as I hope studying it will for the reader.

It seemed that each time I searched through all of those unpublished sessions (covering well over a decade) for just the right supplementary material, I found something new. More often than not, this made me redo my own notes in unanticipated ways — always a creative challenge that was most enjoyable, and yet, paradoxically, one that at times was very frustrating. Such episodes often caused me to take much longer to produce finished work. I learned a patience that I hadn’t suspected was possible for me. For this patience, employed in conjuring up thoughts and images through words, was objectively and subjectively quite different in quality from that which I was so used to using in producing painted images. I could feel my mind and abilities, using either words or pictures, stretch as a result.

In my notes introducing Volume 1, I wrote about placing the basic “artistic ideas” embodied in the Seth material at our conscious, aesthetic, and practical service in daily life. That’s really what Seth’s work is all about, in my opinion. Such an endeavor essentially involves the pursuit of an ideal, and represents our attempts to give physical and mental shape to the great inner, creative commotion of the universe that each person intuitively feels. Of course Jane and I want Seth’s ideas and our own to touch responsive reflexes within others; then each individual can use the material in his or her own expression of that useful ideal, letting it serve to stimulate inner perceptions.

“In your mind you creatively envision the ideal — the sanity of some future culture that, you hope, our work and [that of] others will bring about. If not tomorrow, then sometime.