“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We hope not. We’ll probably call the police to ask for news, eventually. I may ask them not to refer people here, if they’re not legally bound to. Upon scanning the one manuscript, I found several references to Fred writing on it in a series of restaurants in Pennsylvania—which means of course that he didn’t take a direct flight here from Denver. There may be no such connection. Maybe he landed in Pittsburgh. Maybe he’ comes from Pennsylvania. The manuscript of The Rule Book of Love: A Seth Book, is written on the back of heavy white stationery from Howard Johnson’s motor lodge in Coraopolis, PA, which may be near Philadelphia. I’m not sure. That is, Chapter 16 and a few other pages are. The rest is plain white paper, from who knows where? I definitely ended up feeling sorry for Fred, and I think Jane does too. Too bad she missed him, for as I told her, he’d make beautiful subject matter for a chapter, by inference. So would his manuscript (not a bad title, that), although we couldn’t quote it. It’s a very coherent production in its own way. I know it’s easy to feel bad about what appears to be someone else’s dilemma, but at the same time they live in the reality they’ve created and have their own kinds of protection. Their set of rules of the game are just as strict as ours are—at least that’s the way it seems to be in Fred’s case. All of his behavior was consistent with his beliefs, I’d say. At no time did I feel fear, but at the same time I didn’t want him in the house, where problems might develop getting him out....

“You walked?” I was incredulous. That would be fifteen miles or so. In this weather, without a coat? I wasn’t thinking too clearly yet, but that would be feat par excellence for anyone—let alone lugging two bags along. From the attaché case Fred took the handwritten manuscript of The Rules of Love. “Please. I am Seth. Show this book to Jane and have her read it while I wait here, then you tell me, Robert, what she thinks of it....” This, after Fred comprehended that I had no intention of letting him in the house. Jane could not deal with him, I thought, although he showed no signs of violence. “Please, Fred is getting cold.... If you won’t take the whole manuscript, take just this one chapter—Fifteen—and show that to her. Let her read it. Then you come out and tell Fred what Jane thinks of it. I can help her. She’s going to die soon.”

“If you don’t let me in your house I’ll just die,” Fred said. By now he’d taken two hardcover books from a bag, and given them to me. One by Jerszy Kosinski and one by Somerset Maugham. The latter was an expensive anthology. In one he’d written a note on a blank page to Jane, and to me in the other. Check their phrasing for a close approximation of the way he talked. Fred also handed me a thick, neatly tied package of brown paper and yellow string—The Christ Book, he said, which was for Jane and me, and for Prentice-Hall. I didn’t open it, and still haven’t. When I asked him where he was really from, he said Denver, and that his address was inside the package. It wasn’t on the other manuscript. Nor was I quick-witted enough to ask if he had a family, if anyone knew where he was, or what he did for a living—if he worked, or could—or how he found our house in the first place. I wondered if he was schizophrenic. He appeared to be harmless enough.

I was just going back in after the hot drink when the dark-colored police car pulled up Holley Road and turned into the driveway. I waved to the officer driving. He was a youngish man with a mustache. He came inside the porch and I began to explain the situation to him as briefly as I could. “How did you get here?” he asked Fred. “I walked,” Fred answered. “Fred has read some of our books,” I said. “This is difficult to explain briefly, but he came here from Denver, he said, and he has no money, and nowhere to go when he leaves here. He’s given us those books and manuscripts” —I pointed to them, stacked up on the picnic table—“and he wants my wife to read them. I don’t have his address—”

[...] In 1967, I finished the dream book manuscript, and did much more on the Seth Material. [...] It wasn’t until February 1, 1968 that I sent the dream manuscript out to a publisher. [...] On February 23, the manuscript was returned. [...]

At the time, I had just begun two books — an initial draft outlining the ideas in the Seth Material and a manuscript on dreams that I thought of as my “dream book.” It didn’t occur to me that these two manuscripts could have anything to do with the dream interpretation because they were in the present rather than in the future. [...]

On February 27, I sent the manuscript out again to another publisher. [...] On March 22, both manuscripts came back.

I was disappointed, naturally, but again I sent the dream manuscript out; this time to Prentice-Hall, on April 2, 1968. [...] On April 19, I received a letter from Assistant Editor Tam Mossman, stating that the house might be interested in a book on Seth, utilizing parts of the dream book manuscript. [...]

[...] Like me, he didn’t believe that Fred flew here from Denver—that is, talking a stewardess into giving him free transportation all that way—yet Fred got here somehow, and I explained that the manuscript of Fred’s that I’ve looked over contains descriptions of his landing in Pittsburgh, PA, and working his way east through a series of stops at restaurants, in which he’d add to his manuscript each time. [...]

[...] I had to read the manuscript to find out what was in it, for example; and to that extent the book doesn’t seem mine. [...]

To me, the Seth Material is no longer a continuing manuscript of fascinating theories to be carefully judged against reality. [...]

[...] In yet another state of consciousness, material is received that is supposed to represent remnants of ancient Speaker manuscripts. [...]

As Seth continued dictating The Nature of Personal Reality, I wrote a complete poetry manuscript, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time, in which I worked out many of my own beliefs as per suggestions Seth was giving in his book. [...]

(Then in May 1978 Sue Watkins began helping me by typing the final manuscript for the session notes for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. [...] Jane completed Seven Two in August, and set to work preparing the manuscript for Tam. [...] Jane finished typing her manuscript for Seven Two on October 3, and I helped her correct that book for mailing on October 9. My own mailings for Volume 2 continued until the 21st of the month, when at last that very long project was completed and out of the house in its entirety for the first time. [...]

(Resuming our chronology: On October 24, 1978, Jane worked out the Table of Contents for Seth’s Psyche, and started her Introduction for it on the 26th; we mailed Psyche to Tam in sections as we put the manuscript together, and finished with that endeavor on November 9. On November 14 Eleanor Friede visited us to renew an old friendship and to go over Emir with Jane. No sooner had she left than Tam arrived, two days later, bringing with him the copyedited manuscript² of Seven Two for us to check; on the 20th, our work completed on it, I sent it back to him at Prentice-Hall. [...] On December 7 the copyedited manuscript for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality came; it’s more than 900 pages long, and painstakingly checking every word on every page of that book kept us busy until Christmas Eve; I mailed it to Tam on December 26. Next, on January 13, 1979, the copyedited manuscript for Psyche arrived. [...]

[...] It’s a project that Jane herself never figured she’d do, but wanted done — and Sue, who was a class member, is talented psychically herself, has a newspaper and reporting background, and is ideally qualified for the job.¹ (Conversations, we think, is sure to be published before Mass Events, since Tam is supposed to have Sue’s manuscript in hand by January 1980, for publication in the fall of that year. [...]

[...] She was not editor when the manuscript was submitted to F. Fell.

[...] And so in Ruburt’s manuscript there existed a vitality that of itself would bring about other actions, as indeed I foresaw.

[...] A manuscript, or indeed any art form, contains action and sets up its own climate, either of psychological acceptance or rejection. [...]

The energy charge in this particular manuscript is not only very vivid, but well focused. [...]

(At noon, as we ate, I asked her what she thought the Sinful Self might make of the Speaker manuscript material she’d been getting in recent days. [...]

In the last period of time Ruburt has also produced his material on Speaker manuscripts, for example, when his mood has been on an entirely different nature, when he was immersed in creativity, and he felt a sense of accomplishment. [...]

(“We were wondering what the Sinful Self might think about work on those Speaker manuscripts. [...]

[...] I repeated my question about the Sinful Self’s opinion of Jane working on Speaker manuscripts.)

Last Thursday a letter from Prentice-Hall, suggesting that the Dream Manuscript be converted, sort of, into a book dealing with The Seth Material. [...] I was sort of appalled at the lost work in the Dream manuscript but realized Rob has been right along; and the editor was right. [...]

[...] I explained that I’d become quite interested in the Fred Conyers thing because I’d been reading a couple of pages a day of one of the manuscripts he’d left us: The Rule Book of Love: A Seth Book. I thought the title intriguing. I also thought portions of the manuscript itself were intriguing, quite acute, mixed up with Fred’s obsessions and compulsions, his personal life and family, his far-out ideas, his attempts and frustrations as he tried to use the manuscript as a vehicle toward understanding himself as he attempted to uncover the secrets of his personality: He thought them locked away from his understanding by the very device he had chosen of speaking for Seth. [...]

[...] I have yet to even unwrap his other manuscript, The Christ Book. [...]

[...] We have achieved a situation beneficial to all—for Jane’s will and my own each declares that upon the death of the survivor of the two of us, our estate is to be donated to the Manuscripts and Archives division of Yale University Library, in New Haven, Connecticut. [...]

The collection will include our family trees; my father’s journals and photographs; Jane’s and my own grade-school, high-school, college, and family data; our youthful creative efforts in writing and painting; the comic books and other commercial artwork I produced; our early published and unpublished short stories; my original notes for the sessions; session transcripts, whether published or unpublished, “regular,” private, or from ESP class; tapes, including those made in class of Jane speaking for Seth and/or singing in Sumari; our notes, dream records, journals, and manuscripts; our sketches and paintings; Jane’s extensive poetry; our business correspondence; books, contracts, and files; newsletters about the Seth material, published in the United States and abroad (independently of Jane and me); the greater number of letters from readers—in short, a mass of material showing how our separate beginnings flowed together and resulted in the production of a joint lifework.

[...] An archivist from Manuscripts and Archives has visited us to get a rough idea of the amount of material we have to offer. [...]

[...] He comes through as far more than just a voice delivering manuscript.

[...] I have not read that manuscript through, since it is not quite finished, and I want to avoid conscious involvement with it. [...]

[...] During the first week of that time off from sessions we worked steadily at checking the copyedited manuscript for Psyche. In the meantime, the copyedited manuscript for Emir arrived on the 18th, sent to us by Eleanor Friede at Delacorte Press; and since Emir is a short book, we were able to go over it during one evening and get it in the mail back to Eleanor late the next day. [...]

(On Friday, June 21, 1968, Jane sent the manuscript of her dream book to Parker Publishing Company Inc., Village Square Building, West Nyack, N Y. On Saturday, June 28, a card arrived from Parker with this message:

This will acknowledge receipt of your manuscript for Dreams, Astral Projection and ESP. [...]

[...] The sending out of another manuscript is symbolically important to Ruburt, and represents definite progress. [...]

[...] In a very recent session Seth told Jane to send the manuscript to a publisher beginning with an L or V. The book had already been rejected by Viking, the only V in her index of publishers. [...]

(Jane has mailed the manuscript to Liveright.)

In The Seth Material, I included only a few brief quotes from “The Physical Universe As Idea Construction,” but here I will go into that manuscript somewhat more thoroughly, since it is so close to the “raw form” that erupted from that experience and represents, in embryo, I believe, the material that Seth would later be giving us. The manuscript itself consisted of approximately forty pages of scribbled notes written during the height of the experience. [...]

[...] I discovered later that many of them have appeared in “esoteric” manuscripts throughout the centuries, though to me they were not only completely new but also were accompanied by such intense certainty that I would never be able to doubt their validity.

[...] In the original manuscript, this entire portion came to me as definitions.

It’s impossible to describe the impression that this manuscript made on me, much less to verbalize the experience that accompanied it. [...]

A later trip to New York, perhaps when the manuscript is completed, may however prove most beneficial. [...]

[...] Ruburt’s concern should be with his manuscript. [...]

There should be no vacation unless Ruburt takes the manuscript with him and works upon it. [...]

[...] Actually, I was quite concerned with the quick passage of time, and the pressure to prepare manuscripts for publication. [...]

[...] Most people, however, don’t realize the time or work required to keep up with Seth’s seemingly endless creativity: the sessions to be typed, the various stages of manuscript preparation, or the simple persistence necessary, so that the sessions continue despite life’s normal distractions.

[...] For this manuscript not only presented a fascinating picture of a genius at work, but gave specialized knowledge of a field — art — in which I am at best an amateur. [...]

[...] My own interest in art and Rob’s appreciation of Cézanne’s works helped trigger the Cézanne book, for example; and my own curiosity about William James and Rob’s appreciation of his work helped bring about the James manuscript.

(Did receive an acknowledgement of manuscript prospectus from a Jean Schaefer or the sound Mossman.)

[...] The mailing out of manuscripts with which he is pleased is automatically beneficial, in that energy is being directed outward. [...]

[...] This can apply to actual work on a manuscript, intellectual excitement, or intuitional discovery, but a humdrum creative ritual is defeating for him. [...]

[...] The object was a page of manuscript from Jane’s dream book. [...]

[...] We believe this data is reinforced by the “high ledge shape” data given later, and that it refers to my studio, wherein the page of manuscript used as object was written. [...]

[...] She said it is the only one she made for the dream book; she has the habit of making many notes on her manuscript, but very few diagrams of this kind.

[...] She said she felt red or blue refers to the fact that she uses two different pens in correcting manuscript—a red one and a blue one; but we are not sure.