“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.

Rob’s notes provide the necessary exterior orientation for this present volume, as they do for the previous Seth books, and hint at the framework of normal life in which Seth so gallantly “appears” twice weekly, tossing off my glasses and thereby signaling the beginning of my trance. Besides this, of course, my own moods, speculations, joys and sorrows have spun their earthly web through my mind on such days. I may have worked well or poorly at my own writing. The day may have been calm or distracted by unexpected guests, or marked by any of life’s normal domestic ups and downs.

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.