“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We did have a few “deleted” sessions for ourselves. Jane also kept her ESP class going, and within that spontaneous format she often spoke for Seth, or sang in Sumari,¹ her trance language. The break in book dictation gave me time to begin attending class regularly, and I plan to continue doing so. And when I began sitting in on class, I discovered anew that its loose structure served as a catalyst for certain little psychic events that I find most enjoyable: Tuesday night is class night, and often such an experience takes place as I rest for half an hour late that afternoon. I record each episode [no matter when I have it]. Sometimes I make a drawing also, and use that to supplement my description of the event in class.

(In the meantime, on Saturday morning, July 27, Jane received her first copy of The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book, from her publisher. She was delighted. So was I. The book’s physical appearance was most pleasing to us. As an artist, I’m very conscious of whether I think the “package” equals its contents, though since she is verbally oriented this is less important to Jane.

(Just as I had some small psychic adventures during our time off from “Unknown” Reality, Jane did too. One of hers that I’ll mention here is related to published material. During the night following the arrival of that first copy of Personal Reality, while lying quietly beside me in an altered state of consciousness, Jane received information of how “the ancients paralyzed the air.” It could then be walked upon and manipulated in various other ways. She woke me up to tell me about the experience, and to remind her to write an account of it the next day. She couldn’t identify its source, except to say that she hadn’t been dreaming. At the breakfast table, I told her I thought the material was connected to the sessions in Personal Reality on the interior sound, light, and electromagnetic values “around or from which” the physical image forms. Involved here also, I added, were certain ideas in her novel The Education of Oversoul Seven.²

(I haven’t read “Unknown” Reality since I finished typing the last session for it over three months ago; Jane had reviewed all of Seth’s material on the book last week yet still had to remind herself today of the contents of that [707th] session. While we went over it this afternoon I became aware of a familiar, though infrequent, sound: the honking of geese. It was the kind of transient commotion I could listen to indefinitely. The southbound flight was soon out of sight in the rainy sky, and in another few moments it was out of hearing.

(I took the sign of migration as a good omen, though, for the circumstances of the flight were strongly reminiscent of those described at the beginning of the 687th session, in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality. It had been raining then, too, on that day last March — and as I wrote at the time, in some half-romantic fashion I’ve hooked up the flights of geese with Jane’s and my work on the Seth books. I’m still surprised that I’ve done so, for whatever reasons; but we’re ready to dig in for a winter’s work.

(As we sat waiting for the session at 8:50 Jane felt a little nervous; she often does after a layoff from book dictation. But she laughed, as she has before in such cases: “I just want to get it — the beginning — over with.” At 8:55, moving closer to that familiar dissociated state, approaching that psychological bridge which serves as a common meeting ground for Seth and herself she announced that she felt “a rather generalized idea of what Seth will say on the book stuff.” Less clear were some data about herself but she thought Seth would cover all of that along with his material on “Unknown” Reality. “I guess we’ll start out with the book….”

(Jane’s delivery as Seth was good. Indeed, it was often fast with no sense of the three-month break that had ensued since the 707th session.)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(11:00. Jane’s trance had been excellent. She vaguely remembered that Seth had talked about “sleepwalkers.” I described the material briefly, then added, “It would be a joke if that information applied to our own ancestors, our cavemen, as we think of them.” Whereupon Jane said she thought it did at one level, but she didn’t elaborate.

(She wanted Seth to discuss a couple of her own questions, now that he had “Unknown” Reality underway again, so I suggested we ask for that material now. Jane hesitated. “I sense stuff on both the book and me; I don’t know what to do. Wait — there’s a practice element involved….”

(What followed were three and a half pages of material for Jane and me. Here are a few condensed, more generalized excerpts.)

(Seth said good night at 12:18 A.M. Jane’s deliveries had been very energetic throughout the session.

(In his material above, concerning Jane’s search for newer, larger frameworks of belief once she began to dispense with her old “comforting” ideas, Seth very lucidly dealt with certain aspects of the role she’s chosen for this life. However, I want to emphasize here the emotional terms of Jane’s search — and state that at times those qualities have been very difficult for her to contend with. To some degree I’ve been involved in many changes of belief also, but I’m a participator in the development of the Seth Material, not its originator; the pressures and challenges weren’t — aren’t — as demanding. [With a humor born out of many a struggle, however, I note that it isn’t easy to give up certain cherished old beliefs, even when they’re demonstrably wrong, they may fit the personality all too well…. ]

(In connection with these notes, and Seth’s excerpts after 11:40, then, I recommend a review of the following in Volume 1:

(1. The material on Jane, religion, and mysticism in the Introductory Notes, the 679th session and Appendix 1 for that session.

2. In Personal Reality, see sessions 623–25 in Chapter 5. In Oversoul Seven, see the material in Chapter 12, for example, wherein Jane described not only the airborne movement of objects — rocks — but an “extra tension” in the air itself, “as if a million vowels and syllables rose into the air, all glittering, all … alive; like animals of sound….”

6. In Volume 1, all of the material in Session 686, including that for Practice Element 1, can apply here.

7. All in Volume 1: Seth refers to some varieties of ancient man in Session 689 (also see Note 4), and in Session 691 after 10:30. Then see Appendix 6 for Jane’s material on parallel man, alternate man, and probable man.

In addition, the reader might review Seth’s information on ancient civilizations, as presented in Chapter 15 of Seth Speaks.

10. This material immediately reminded me that before the session tonight Jane and I had discussed Seth’s promise to answer the two questions I’d posed for him before sessions 698–99, in Volume 1. The question of interest here (I summarized them both in the notes following the 699th session) had to do with my inability to comprehend an “unconscious” species state. Not that I thought Seth was going out of his way to deal with such concepts tonight, but by the time he was through with his material on the sleepwalkers, I thought he’d considered at least one possible facet of my inquiry.

The 699th session, in Volume 1, dealt in part with dream images and subjective dream “photographs.” I used Note 1 for that session to insert one of my favorite Jane poems: My Dreaming Self. She wrote it in 1965, a year and a half or so after beginning the Seth material. Now I can add that at the time Jane actually wrote two poems on dreaming; I’ve been saving the second one for use in Volume 2.

12. And added two weeks or so later: I see connections between the “centuries of inactivity” that Seth describes in this (708th) session, and certain unique psychic abilities of Jane’s — namely, those involving “massiveness” and “long sound.” In Volume 1, see not only Session 681 between 10:22 and 11:47 for data on one of her massive experiences, but that session’s accompanying Appendix 3. Then in this section of Volume 2, see both Note 9 and Appendix 19 for the 712th session, concerning material on Jane’s long-sound trances; during one of these it could theoretically take her a week — or a century — of our time to pronounce just one syllable of one word.

13. By “nerve ends” Seth means the synapses, which are the minute sites where neurons, or nerve cells, contact each other.