“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 and I grew up in the world of Freudian and Darwinian concepts too, of course. And we weren’t given any magical immunity from the unfortunate results of such cramped vision. Those theories, along with religion’s belief in the flawed self, have left their marks on all of our lives. Rob and I have been given a new, vaster philosophical structure through the Seth sessions, one that we share with our readers. And that structure is still emerging. It is far from finished. The answers are not all in. We are still learning how to ask the right questions.

When Seth began this manuscript, I was personally working with the idea of “heroic impulses” (those separate from our usual ones) that would operate as inner impetuses toward constructive action. In this book, though, Seth states that it is our normal everyday impulses that we must learn to trust. Even I was taken back! Our usual impulses? The ones I ignored while I was looking for the “heroic” ones? And finally I began to understand: Our normal impulses are heroic, despite our misunderstanding of them. In a way, this entire book is an introduction to our impulses, those we follow and those we deny.

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.

And what is my own part in all of this? I see it as harking back to the poet’s original role; to explore the reaches of his or her private psyche, pushing against usual psychological boundaries until they give, opening up a new mystical territory — the psyche of the people, of the species itself — perceiving a spectacular vision of inner reality that the poet then communicates to the people, translating that vision through words, rhythm, or songs.