“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In Note 1, I described my third “Roman,” which took place this afternoon. (“I guess I’m confused,” Jane said as we waited for the session to begin. “I think Seth’s going to start another section tonight — but I don’t think he’s quite finished with the last one….” However, Section 4 was finished after all.)

(10:19. Jane’s delivery had been quite a bit faster than usual — which means she’d kept me writing at a steady pace even though I was recording the material with my homemade “shorthand.” She said she felt that in this section Seth would have a series of exercises related to the one he’d just given, these would help people glimpse at least some of the alternate or probable realities discussed in Section 4.

(11:20. “No,” I said. Seth-Jane’s pace had been good, though — quiet yet forceful.)

(11:34. “No,” I said again, in answer to Seth-Jane’s obvious concern. It was a warm night for the end of October, and we had the windows open, the traffic noise from the busy intersection just one house removed was bothering me more than anything else.)

(11:46 P.M. Break turned out to mark the end of the session, though. Jane was surprised at the time; she’d been in trance for over an hour. “My God — he’s got the whole thing all laid out,” she exclaimed. She too had been bothered by the rush and clatter of traffic, even in trance, and we talked about moving to quieter surroundings before next summer.⁴

(Jane wanted to continue the session, but she was also hungry. “I feel guilty,” she laughed. “I want a nice big snack but I feel all this stuff that Seth’s got ready, right on the line … Oh, to hell with it — let’s eat!”)

As I prepared to sleep this afternoon I had my third vision in the series. Presumably this will be the last one — for now, closely following upon my precarious circumstance in the water, I saw myself as dead. When I woke up I made another little drawing: I showed my Roman-captain self still face down in the water, but entangled with the branches projecting from a waterlogged tree trunk — I’d been caught that way for a while, before a group of fishermen on a North American beach hauled body and tree ashore in their net. At least, I thought as I described the experience to Jane, I dared face my death in that life after the fact of its happening, even if I didn’t care to undergo the actual process.

And added later: Jane did use my three Roman experiences in her Psychic Politics; she’d mentioned doing so after the second one had taken place, and ended up quoting my own accounts of them in Chapter 4. (As I wrote up my third vision, incidentally, I called myself “captain,” automatically using present-day terminology to denote a certain military rank Then I began to wonder if such a classification had even existed in the Roman armed forces in those ancient times. I learned that it had: A captain was called a “centurio.”)

3. Later, in Chapter 10 of Politics, Jane elaborated upon Seth’s “Joe” material. She also related Joe’s limited model of his nature to some of her own ideas about disciplining her “writing self.”