“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.

(From the ESP class session for January 7, 1975:) Ruburt can do many things that surprise me — that I did not do in my past, for remember that fresh creativity emerges from the past also, as in Ruburt’s novel, Oversoul Seven.²⁹

By then I’d lost many months from my job as a commercial artist, which was work I’d returned to several years earlier to help ease our financial pressures. I was 44 years old — and, as I recognized after the sessions began, at a point in life where I greatly needed more penetrating insights into the meaning of existence. So did Jane, even though she was almost 10 years younger. As the sessions became part of our joint reality, we gradually came to understand that the illness I struggled with was a disguised expression of rebellion for both of us. We were very dissatisfied with our status quo: After years of work, Jane had managed to publish but a few poems and a few pieces of science fantasy (several short stories and two brief novels), and in my own view I wasn’t making it as the kind of artist I wanted to be. We were driven to know more — about art, about writing, about the human condition, about everything. My own need, as well as Jane’s, struck deep responses within her psyche.