“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

“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 what about aggressive or contradictory or even murderous impulses? How can those be trusted? Seth answers those questions and many more, until as we read his explanations we wonder how we could have so misread our own nature as to distrust the very messages meant to lead us toward our own spiritual growth and that of the species as well.

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.

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.

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.