“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In the opening notes for the 708th session, in this Volume 2, I wrote that Jane finished Adventures in August 1974. She’d started it in July 1971 [as noted a few paragraphs ago], but there was never any straight line of activity for her on the book from beginning to end. She finished Seth Speaks. Then during a class in November 1971, she first gave voice to her trance language, Sumari; so besides the other class material she had several more stages of consciousness — if very dependable ones — to deal with in Adventures. At the same time she worked on her autobiography, From This Rich Bed [which still isn’t done]. At times the creative pace grew even more complicated: From March to July 1972, she put Adventures aside completely to write her novel, The Education of Oversoul Seven, when that idea spontaneously came to her. But overall, Jane discovered that she was frustrated in dealing with class experiments and records for Adventures while she still had so much to learn about her own connections with Seth. More than ever, she needed larger concepts of reality to explain her experiences, those of her students, and of some who wrote.

(Shortly after Jane finished Seven, the entire idea for what she calls “Aspect Psychology” came to her — an “intuitive construct” that she thought was large enough to contain her experience. At one sitting she wrote 20 or so pages of material in which she understood her relationship with Seth, Seth Two, the Sumari, the characters in Seven, and other psychic concepts — all as aspects of a larger self that was independent of space and time. The aspects represented the dynamics of personality. As Jane wrote, she realized that the questions she had been struggling with in Adventures had triggered a new psychology, a new way of approaching the creative portions of human personality.

26. Although in that 1971 class Seth stressed his experiences with the human condition through reincarnation, in 1964 he’d had this to say: “To me this [reincarnational and family material] is all so obvious that I almost hesitate to mention it, but this is because I tend to forget what human experience on your plane actually involves.” (See the excerpts from the 27th session in this appendix.) In that early session Seth spoke to me alone; in class he faced a large group. I’d say that from his position or focus as an “energy personality essence” both attitudes are true, rather than contradictory — and that one or the other predominated according to the circumstances and subject matter of the session involved. I don’t think the time gap between the two sessions — seven years — was a factor.

29. See Chapter 17 of Oversoul Seven, for instance. In Personal Reality, Seth discussed “a sort of reprogramming” of the past; see sessions 653–54 in Chapter 14.