“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.

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.

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.

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.

Following this, in our next session, Seth confirmed that the material amounted to a partial outline for his projected new book, and that the title I’d “picked up” while he was still finishing Mass Events was correct. So though he hasn’t begun it as of this writing, two days later, surely he will start dictating Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment any day now. My glasses will go off. Seth will say again, “Now: Dictation,” and Rob will make up a new title page for his notebook.

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.