“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.

While Seth was dictating The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, for example, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred; and had the affair turned into a disaster, our Chemung County would have been used to house refugees. Many spectacular national events have happened, of course, since our first sessions took place late in 1963, but Seth seldom mentioned such issues, and then only in answer to our own questions. In this current book, however, he discusses in depth how our private realities merge into mass experience. For that reason he examines the public arena, and devotes a good deal of material to Three Mile Island and to the Jonestown mass suicides as well. Both situations occurred as Seth was dictating this book, and while they are contemporary, both cases are classic in their implications.

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.

What truths? That our dreams come alive at midday; that our feelings and beliefs turn into the reality we experience; that, in deeper terms, we are the events in which we participate, and that murder for the sake of an ideal is still murder. But more than this, Seth reminds us of something we knew as children: We are of good intent.

“You make your own reality.” That statement is one of the cornerstones of Seth’s material, stated almost from the beginning of our sessions and emphasized throughout his books. In Mass Events, though, Seth goes further, maintaining that our private impulses are meant to provide the impetus for the development of our own abilities in a way that will also contribute to the best interests of the species and the natural world as well. He’s speaking of our normal impulses here, those that we’ve been taught are dangerous, chaotic, and contradictory. Seth maintains that we can’t trust ourselves while distrusting our impulses at the same time. Much of this book is concerned with the purposes of our impulses, and the reasons for their poor reputations in the eyes of science and religion. What Seth is really saying here is that our impulses are meant to help us create our own realities on a personal basis in a way that will enhance both our private lives and our civilizations.

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.

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.

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.