“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“All I know,” Jane said tonight at 8:50, “is that I want to get back to the sessions again. I don’t care whether we get stuff on “Unknown” Reality, or personal material, or what. Just so we get going — I’m always nervous about starting things up again after a layoff….”¹

(She made her remarks after I’d read her Seth’s last session [the 740th for February 2] from my notes earlier this evening, I still don’t have it typed. Incredibly, that session is already six weeks old. We’ve been involved in so many activities since then that it’s difficult to decide which of them to refer to in these notes, and to what extent. Except for the few listed below, then, it may be sufficient to just state that we’ve been in our hill house for a month, and that after much hard physical labor² we’ve settled down enough to resume our natural rhythms of painting, sessions, books, and play. I have a room I’m converting into a studio, and one in which to work on this manuscript. And for the first time since we married 20 years ago [in 1954], Jane has a room to herself for her own writing — if she chooses to use it. So far she’s preferred to work before the picture window in the living room.

(Our house connections continue to accumulate, often in unexpected ways. From her own viewpoint Jane has already produced for Psychic Politics some very perceptive material on our move to the hill house: “So we made our own special place in more ordinary terms, by symbolizing that particular house and corner, marking it ours, stamping it with the imprint of living symbols which we transposed upon it. Henceforth it had a magic quality.”³

(Jane hasn’t restarted ESP class yet. We’re not sure when we’ll be able to manage that. Class may have to wait until Seth finishes his work on “Unknown” Reality.

(We’ve largely finished correcting proofs on both the text and the drawing captions for Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness, which will be published in June. We’ve also seen a first color proof of the jacket design for her Dialogues, scheduled for publication next fall.⁴

(As if to celebrate our way of life and work in the house on the hill, we were visited last Saturday by Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor at Prentice-Hall, and a publishing colleague of his. One result of our meeting [as I wrote at the beginning of the Introductory Notes for Volume 1], was the decision to publish this long manuscript for “Unknown” Reality in two volumes.⁵

(In ordinary terms, I think that during our first month in the hill house we’ve been busy forming a fresh psychic atmosphere within which we can feel comfortable — and that anyone in a similar situation intuitively does the same thing. Perhaps not until a start is made in this way can any of us initiate certain functions in the “new” place. Actually, then, we seek to wed the old environment with the new, using the psyche as a bridge between the two worlds. Now when Jane and I drive past the old house we lived in on Water Street, close by downtown Elmira, we engender within ourselves mixed feelings of strangeness and familiarity. We see the intimately known windows of the two apartments we shared still vacant, the blinds hanging at careless angles. Friends have told us both places are being redecorated to a modest degree. “I’m glad they’re being changed,” Jane said the other day, in a strangely possessive response. “That means the world we had there can’t ever be entered by anyone else.”

(In that big, intriguing house her whole psychic world — and mine — had begun to open up late in 1963; various aspects of that becoming are detailed in her different books. Yet when Jane left the Water Street apartments that day in March, she never looked back: When she’s through with something, she’s through with it. She’s remarkably free in that way. I’m the one who’s apt to become attached to old things, old places, to look back with a bit of nostalgia. Now as we waited for tonight’s session to begin, our 14-year-old cat, Willy, dozed on the couch beside me. At the same time our black cat, Rooney, who’d died in his fifth year, lay in his grave in the backyard of the house on Water Street.⁶

(Jane lit a cigarette and sipped at a beer. Then she took off her glasses. By the time she laid them on the coffee table between us she was in trance. Speaking as Seth, she began to very comfortably and easily deliver the next session for “Unknown” Reality.)

(10:23. Jane was very quickly out of a fine trance that had lasted for just over an hour. Willy had slept beside me all of the time, twisting himself into a variety of positions. “I feel relaxed, relieved, and exhausted, now that we’ve started things up again,” Jane said, yawning. “I almost think I could go to bed right now, but I know I won’t. There: I just picked up the next two or three sentences for after break,” she said as she got up and moved about, “but they can wait.”

(Still in full trance, her eyes very dark Jane stared at me. Then I watched the Seth personality begin to recede, to fade. Jane blinked a few times, and Seth was gone. 11:26 P.M.)

1. Checking, I soon discovered that Jane had said much the same thing as we sat for the 708th session, following a three-month break in book sessions. See the opening notes.

2. A number of our friends — some of them members of ESP class — helped us move on Saturday, March 15. They even furnished the trucks. Their strenuous efforts will be endlessly appreciated: Anyone who has ever carried heavy furniture, or innumerable boxes of goods, up and down steep and turning flights of stairs will understand the gratitude Jane and I feel.

3. This passage is from Chapter 20 of Politics. Then see Chapter 21 for more of Jane’s material on our moving.

5. Five months ago, in the 721st session, I noted Jane’s speculations “that ‘Unknown’ Reality might prove to be so long that it could go into two volumes — a probable development I hardly took seriously.”