“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.

Robert F. Butts, my husband, sits on the couch across from me, taking verbatim notes of what I say as Seth, transcribing these “other-worldly” communications with a modern pen on good white bond paper. When I held ESP classes, Seth’s sessions were always taped, and just this week he “came through” as I was being recorded for a radio program to be aired later. So technology, with all of its implications, is never really too far away.

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.

But if we are of good intent, how can we sometimes end up involved in the most reprehensible of actions? Seth faces such questions squarely, and deals with the motivations of both the fanatic and the idealist. And people are idealistic. Many readers of all ages write us, asking how they can develop their own potentials and also help bring about “a better world.” They care deeply, and abhor the adverse conditions they see in society, whether or not they are intimately concerned with them. In this book Seth clearly shows how each of us can contribute to the mass reality, and concisely outlines the issues so that we don’t fall prey to disillusionment or fanaticism.

Since we are all involved with world events, it is highly important that we also understand how we fit into those global actions, and see how our negative beliefs about ourselves and the species can result in situations far less than ideal, and quite different from our stated goals. For this reason, Seth explains how the theories of Freud and Darwin confine our imaginations and our abilities.

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.

I’ve had my own hassles with impulses, following only those I thought would lead me where I wanted to go, and drastically cutting down those I feared might distract me from my work. Like many other people, I thought that following my impulses was the least dependable way of achieving any goal — unless I was writing, when impulses of a “creative” kind were most acceptable. I didn’t realize that all impulses were creative. As a result of such beliefs, I’ve had a most annoying arthritis-like condition for some years that was, among other things, the result of cutting down impulses toward physical motion.

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.

The earliest poets were probably half shaman, half prophet, speaking for the forces of nature, for the “spirits” of the living and the dead, voicing their visions of man’s unity with the universe. They spoke their messages, sang their songs, chanted their visions aloud. And maybe that’s why Seth speaks, communicating first through words, rather than, say, through automatic writing. Seth’s books are first of all spoken productions. Perhaps the Seth sessions themselves harken back to some ancient time when we received much of our pertinent information about ourselves in just such a fashion: one of us journeying for the others into the “mass unconsciousness” — a journey that somehow altered and expanded the personality — and then communicating our visions as best we could.

So I do think more is involved. I think that Seth is a model of ourselves as we know we can be; that he speaks for the part of ourselves that never for a minute believed all that nonsense about flawed selves.

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?

No sooner did I sit down than such a rich vein of material opened that I could hardly write fast enough to get it all down; and it began where my earlier ideas had ended off. I was being given many of the subject headings for — Seth’s next book, even as I was writing the Introduction for this one! Behind each heading or subject, I sensed realms of information available to Seth, but not (in usual terms) to me. Yet there had been an earlier moment just before the onrush of material when I sensed an odd psychological threshold, a certain accelerated state, that in this case at least signaled the intersection of Seth’s thoughts and mine. Then there was a brief point of psychological rest, an almost neutral psychological platform in which Seth’s outline began to emerge.

So while Seth’s books go out into the public world, the sessions themselves rise from our private lives. Yet those lives are lived in coexistence with a mass arena of events that brush against us gently at times, or drastically affect our days on other occasions. In this book Seth describes the continuum of existence that holds us all together and blends our private experiences into world events. This is your world and ours. Hopefully, this book will help us all make it a better world.