“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Fortunately, class member Sue Watkins managed to tape all but the first few paragraphs of the session, but even the sense of those was taken down in longhand by another student while Sue got our recorder going. [I really enjoyed letting someone else do all the work for a change!] Later that week, Sue transcribed Seth’s material, wrote all of the notes for the session, and prepared mimeographed copies for everyone. Only portions of the session are given here, and I’ve rearranged them — and Sue’s notes — a bit for convenience’s sake. From her transcript, then:)

Now, I have tried to tell you this before. The experience of the guru⁵ who sits in opulence, bejeweled and begowned, has nothing to do with the peasant who works in the field and whose belly is empty. And so it has been through the centuries.

In your terms, your histories were not written by the people who worked the earth. They were created by the priests and the elite, who made up their own histories to suit their purposes — to hold down the masses, for reasons that I will someday discuss, for they are important. Those histories never spoke of the vast, massive emotions and needs of the human beings involved, who listened, because their hearts and survival depended upon their doing so, to the voices that speak within the earth that your instruments even now cannot perceive. Those histories did not tell of the human beings who had to know what insects would crawl or fly from one end of a continent to another, so that they could be captured and roasted and eaten. They did not speak of the human beings who had to know what migrations of animals would roam through their land — and when and where, and at what phase of the moon — lest they starve….

It did not serve your species’ purposes at this time to work with the mind — with telepathy, with the feeling for the earth that you could have developed.

[...] Similarly, to be a musician or an artist or a writer takes effort in time, and automatically focuses attention in specified directions that bar the same kind of work in other fields.

[...] Earlier in this work I hinted at the hypothetical existence of a truly fulfilled earth-person — with a hyphen.¹ All of the spiritual, mental, and biological abilities would be actualized to whatever extent possible. [...]

[...] These are the result of private challenges that can best be worked out within a certain kind of framework. [...]

Give us a moment … Certain abilities can be developed with much greater ease in particular time periods — in a highly industrialized technology, for example — and those interested in that kind of an environment did not generally appear in the eras of the cavemen, simply because those alive at that time were working with different challenges. [...]

[...] (Humorously:) I’ll have a hell of a time with my list of chronological lives (which I have yet to work on, by the way) if I start turning up a whole group of them in one historical period. [...]

[...] So you work out your problems and challenges in whatever way you choose, historically. [...]

3. Yes, I learned from several reference works containing photographs, drawings, and maps, Jerusalem before A.D. 50 had been walled in. [...]

[...] For one thing, I’m sure that my imagery — and drawings — of Jerusalem’s fortifications would turn out to be much too meager in scale; surely those “real” works would be far more overpowering in height and mass. [...]