“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I’m proud to publish this book under my own name, though I don’t fully understand the mechanics of its production or the nature of the personality I assume in delivering it. I had no conscious work to do on the book at all. I simply went into trance twice a week, spoke in a “mediumistic” capacity for Seth, or as Seth, and dictated the words to my husband, Robert Butts, who wrote them down.

My idea briefly is this: Our usual orientation is focused pretty exclusively in what we think of as the “real” world, but there are many realities. By shifting our consciousness, we can glimpse these alternate realities, and all of them are the appearance that Reality takes under certain conditions. I don’t believe that we can necessarily describe one in terms of another.

As Seth continued dictating The Nature of Personal Reality, I wrote a complete poetry manuscript, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time, in which I worked out many of my own beliefs as per suggestions Seth was giving in his book. This led to another group of poems, The Speakers. To me this all means that there is a rich vein of creativity and knowledge available to each according to his abilities, just beneath the surface of usual consciousness. I believe that it is a part of our human heritage, accessible to some extent to any person who explores the inner dimensions of the mind.

Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time, The Speakers, and some Sumari poetry are being combined into a book that will be published soon by Prentice-Hall. I consider it a companion book to this one. It shows what was happening in my personal reality while Seth was writing his book on the subject, and reveals how the creative impetus splashes out into all areas of the personality. Seth often refers to the poems and to the experiences that initiated them. Many of those events occurred as I tried to understand the relationship between his world and mine, and the connection between inner and outer experience.

In the meantime all I can say is this: We live in a world of physical facts but these spring from a deeper realm of creativity, and in a real sense facts are fictions that spring alive in our experience. All facts. Seth, then, is as much a fact as I am or you are, and in a strange way he straddles both worlds. I hope that Aspects will also span the world of facts and the rich inner realities from which they come, for our experience includes each.

The Nature of Personal Reality not only enriched my creative life but challenged my ideas and beliefs. I agree wholeheartedly with the concepts Seth presents here, while realizing that they run counter to many accepted religious, social, and scientific dogmas. Certainly this book is an answer to all those who have written for help in applying Seth’s ideas to ordinary living, and I am certain that it will assist many people in dealing with the varied events and problems of daily life.

The message is plain: We are not at the mercy of the subconscious, or helpless before forces that we cannot understand. The conscious mind directs unconscious activity and has at its command all of the powers of the inner self. These are activated according to our ideas about reality. “We are gods couched in creaturehood,” Seth says, given the ability to form our experience as our thoughts and feelings become actualized.