“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

“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.

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.

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.

If so, though, such altered “between world” personalities can be remarkably stable; and if they form according to our ideas of individuality, they can certainly outdo us in their unique complexity. For if Seth is only a psychological model filled out by my unconscious trance material, then he certainly puts our usual concepts of personality to shame, and by implication shows that we ourselves have a long way to go if we are to use our full potential.

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?