“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Following the conference with her editor late in June, Jane has devoted herself to finishing her manuscript for Adventures, while I’ve worked steadily on the diagrams for it, as well as on the drawings for Dialogues. I completed the detailed pencil guides for both sets of art this week. Next comes the finished work for publication, which I’ll produce by placing a sheet of clear acetate over each guide, then rendering on that untouched surface the final version in “line,” or pen and ink. This is my own system; the acetate, riding above the penciled outlines, leaves me free to search for various spontaneous effects that are quite inhibited if I try to follow those preliminary images too literally. Then in late August, long before I had the 16 diagrams [plus two other pieces of art] done for Adventures, I mailed to Prentice-Hall Jane’s completed manuscript for that book. Adventures is scheduled for publication in mid-1975, but I’ll continue referring to it in these notes.

(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.

(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….”

(We sat quietly. We could hear the automobiles swooshing across the new Walnut Street Bridge that lifted gracefully over the Chemung River, less than a quarter of a block from our apartment house; it had been raining earlier this evening and the traffic noise was softened. Incidentally, in a brief ceremony, the four-lane span had been opened to the public just this morning. Its old fashioned predecessor had been destroyed by Tropical Storm Agnes in June 1972; see my notes for the 613th session in Chapter 1 of Personal Reality.

Some individuals find themselves with memories of other lives, which are other days to the soul. Such persons then become aware of a greater consciousness reaching over those gaps, and realize that earthly experience can contain [among other things] a knowledge of existence in more than one body. Inherently then consciousness, affiliated with the flesh, can indeed carry such comprehensions. The mind of man as you know it shows at least the potential ability for handling a kind of memory with which you are usually not acquainted. This means that even biologically the species is equipped to deal with different sequences of time, while still manipulating within one particular time scheme. This also implies a far greater psychological richness — quite possible, again, within corporal reality — in which many levels of relationships can be handled. Such inner knowledge is inherent in the cells, and in ordinary terms of evolution is quite possible as a “future” development.