“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Seth did give much unexpected material about the brain — and about his own reality, incidentally — but the session turned out to be so long and closely interrelated that I found it very difficult to excerpt; most of the portions I picked out were left hanging, or were too incomplete. Naturally, Seth said what he said from his own viewpoint. I ended up choosing the few quotations gathered together here just to indicate the direction of the information, while hoping that the entire session, with others promised on the subject by Seth, will be published some day.

(The following excerpt is from an ESP class session that Seth delivered three months after the 711th session [which inspired this appendix] was held on October 9, 1974. As noted much earlier, the chronology for our study of the Jane-Ruburt-Seth relationship “begins long before ‘Unknown’ Reality was started, and continues well beyond the date of its ending in April 1975.” Very soon, then, the quotations to come reach beyond that date: They’re usually short, and are from a mixture of class, regular, and private [or “deleted”] sessions. With an exception or two they contain material that ordinarily might not have been published for several years — if ever. But all of them contribute insights into the subject under consideration.

13. Following his comments about his reassembly in our reality, Seth went into some analogous material (in that 28th session) that I’ve always wanted to see published. In part, then: “Condensed time is the time felt or experienced by the entity, while any of its given personalities ‘live’ — and you had better put that in quotes — on a plane of physical materializations. To go into this a bit further, many men have said that life was a dream. They were true to the facts in one strong regard, and yet far afield as far as the main issue is concerned.

23. The 241st session, mentioned in Note 22, is one of those we hope to publish in full, for in it Seth discussed how the psychological bridge helps Jane “translate” his telepathic material. The information came through in connection with our envelope tests and those for Dr. Instream, both sets of which were in mid-course then, in March 1966. (See the account of Jane’s “year of testing” and the excerpts from sessions 179–80.)

25. Jane held her first ESP class on the evening of September 12, 1967, although she didn’t let Seth come through within that format until the following December, so cautious was she in taking that psychic step. She had no personal experience or other precedent to go by; her How to Develop Your ESP Power had been published in 1966, but she was still experimenting with her own abilities (even as she is now). It could also be said that at issue was the whole question of firsthand public interaction with, and acceptance or rejection of, Seth and his material. Classes were quite small for some time, although they’d grown considerably by the end of 1969. After The Seth Material was published in 1970, class became well known enough to start attracting visitors from various parts of the country. It still does so.

(A note added later: Jane’s ESP Power was originally issued by Frederick Fell Publishers, Inc. Pocket Books reprinted it in 1976 as a paperback and with a new title: The Coming of Seth. In Volume 1, see Note 2 of the Preface by Seth.)

(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.

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.