“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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?

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.