“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Our curiosity about such speculations led me to plan this appendix shortly after the 711th session was held, and I asked Jane if Seth could eventually offer some insights about the brain’s electrical reality. He finished dictating Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality in April 1975, and we finally got around to the session I wanted six and a half months later.

(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.

(The 768th session was held on March 22, 1976, 11 months after Seth had finished dictating “Unknown” Reality. Originally Jane and I deleted the following rather personal material from the session — yet we present it here because in it Seth explores further the connections involving the three of us. My notes at the time show that I was also distinctly surprised by Seth’s comments on his emotional behavior at his own “level of activity,” but I soon understood my reaction as a sign that we still had things to learn about him, as well as ourselves. In one passage Seth referred to some health difficulties, now resolved, that had bothered me just before our sessions with him began.

(A note added later: That January 1975 class session is an excellent one in many respects, and Jane presented much of it in Chapter 15 of her Psychic Politics. Although Seth finished his work on both volumes of “Unknown” Reality well before Jane was through with Politics, the latter was published first — and that chronology is treated in my Introductory Notes for Volume 1.