“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A trance is a very private phenomenon. It represents a turning away of consciousness from ordinary reality toward an inner one. However private a trance may be, it must take place in a physical world of shared events. I am touched by those events and so are you; so even while I sit in trance, dictating books as Seth, I can’t after all stray too far from our joint reality. The chair I sit in as I speak for Seth is a product of modern manufacture. The glass of wine on the coffee table before me, the cigarettes, and the mass-produced table itself, are all reminders that my most adventuresome journeys into other realities are rooted, for now at least, in the physical world of events that we all share together.

Rob’s notes provide the necessary exterior orientation for this present volume, as they do for the previous Seth books, and hint at the framework of normal life in which Seth so gallantly “appears” twice weekly, tossing off my glasses and thereby signaling the beginning of my trance. Besides this, of course, my own moods, speculations, joys and sorrows have spun their earthly web through my mind on such days. I may have worked well or poorly at my own writing. The day may have been calm or distracted by unexpected guests, or marked by any of life’s normal domestic ups and downs.

While Seth was dictating Mass Events, for example, another of our cats (Billy) died. Seth was discussing the Three Mile Island accident, but he left off book dictation for a while because we felt so badly, and gave us some excellent material on animal consciousness before and after death — because “tragedies” come in all shapes and sizes, and the most domestic events of our days offer Seth opportunities to comment on life itself.

So even if I was focused elsewhere and my consciousness turned inward, a spotlight was thrown upon our world from that other viewpoint, almost as if a character in one of our dreams suddenly came awake, walked out of the dream, and dared comment on our waking world. Perhaps this isn’t a good analogy — Seth is far from a dream character, and in fact I hardly ever dream of him at all — but he is a personality whose platform of reality isn’t the same as ours, a personality who writes books through me, but from his standpoint, not mine.

In the past, when Seth told me to trust the spontaneous self, I said “Okay,” and imagined some hypothetical inner self somehow apart from my conscious intents. But when Seth kept repeating “Trust your impulses” in this book, I finally got the message through my head — and I’ve already had considerable physical improvement as a result. This distant-seeming inner self wasn’t so distant after all; “it” communicated through my impulses. In a way, impulses are the language of the psyche.

As far as my relationship with Seth and his with me, because of our long-standing association I think we must have formed a unique psychological alliance; somehow I am part Seth, and in sessions at least, Seth must be part Jane, in a kind of psychological bonding on both sides. Seth must use my voice to speak and my life as reference, and certainly the contents of my mind are vastly expanded as a result of the sessions. My daily life is lived with the knowledge of that association, of course, and my normal routine now includes “turning into Seth” twice weekly, and has for years.

This Introduction represents my only conscious contribution to this entire book, for example. But certainly as Seth often states, even the unconscious portions of our personalities are actually conscious. It’s all a matter of focus. Not that Seth is just another focus of mine, for it’s quite legitimate to say that I’m a focus of his consciousness in that same context; but that Seth represents that larger portion of the psyche from which our own kind of consciousness emerges. The point of all of this is the exploration of human consciousness, its ranges and scopes. How much does it change as it approaches other levels of actuality?

But however we attempt to define Seth’s reality, I’m convinced of one thing by now: He is delivering to our conscious minds our deepest unconscious knowledge about ourselves, the world, the universe, and the source of Being Itself. Not that Seth claims any kind of omnipotence, because he doesn’t. His material, however, is clearly providing such translations of unconscious knowledge, and intuitive disclosures; disclosures, according to Seth, no more remarkable than those available in nature itself, but we have forgotten how to read nature’s messages; disclosures no more mysterious than those available in our own states of inspiration, but we’ve forgotten how to decipher those communications too. Instead, many people are even frightened of inspiration itself.

I think that such phenomena were important in evolutionary terms, helping to shape man’s consciousness. Not that such material wasn’t often distorted, or just as often discounted: In any case, it would have to be interpreted again and again so that it applied to the species’ experience in time’s framework.

Talk about psychological complexities! I was just presented with an excellent example of the ideas I’ve been discussing. As I wrote the previous few paragraphs of this Introduction, the words themselves seemed to carry me on with a certain rhythm. I felt as if I were drawing on energy and knowledge beyond my usual capacities. Then, since it was late afternoon, I took a break for a brief nap. More ideas came to me that I scribbled down in the bedroom. The subjective pace quickened and kept accelerating — then I hit a psychological brick wall, and I could carry the concept no further. At that point I suddenly recognized Seth “around the edges” of my mind. The next moment, I fell asleep. When I awakened half an hour later, I prepared dinner. Rob and I ate and watched the television news. Then I went back to my study.

The Seth sessions and Seth’s books are inevitably connected to my relationship with Rob, of course. He’s far more than a recorder or transcriber of the material. Rob’s remarkable mind with its questions and probing nature has always stimulated me to do my best, and has served as a kind of invisible but sturdy psychological screen, helping me view myself and the sessions as clearly as possible. If it hadn’t been for his encouragement and active participation, I doubt that the Seth sessions would exist in their present form.