“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.

For years I’ve been confused, trying to define Seth in the usual true-and-false world of facts. There he’s accepted as an independent spirit — a spirit guide by those with spiritualistic beliefs — or as some displaced portion of my own personality by the scientific community. I couldn’t accept either idea, at least not in undiluted form.

If I said, “Look, people, I don’t think Seth is a spirit in the way you mean,” then this was interpreted as an acknowledgement that Seth was only a portion of my personality. Some people thought that I was trying to put Seth down, or deny them the aid of a super-being when at last they thought they’d found one.

While I was trying to define Seth that way and questioning whether or not he was a spirit guide, I was closed off to some extent from his greater reality, which exists in terms of vast imaginative and creative power that is bigger than the world of facts and can’t be contained in it. Seth’s personality is quite observable in our sessions, for example, but the source of that personality isn’t. For that matter, the origin of any personality is mysterious and not apparent in the objective world. My job is to enlarge the dimensions of that world and people’s concepts of it.

Intuitively and emotionally we often understand more than we intellectually realize. Trying to define revelatory knowledge, or a Seth, in terms of our limited ideas about human personality is like trying to translate, say, a rose to the number 3, or trying to explain one in terms of the other.

The funny thing is that a personality not focused in our reality can help people live in that world more effectively and joyfully by showing them that other realities also exist. In this book Seth is saying that you can change your experience by altering your beliefs about yourself and physical existence.

To me, the Seth Material is no longer a continuing manuscript of fascinating theories to be carefully judged against reality. In a strange way it has come alive. The concepts within it live. I experience them and because of this my personal reality has expanded. I’ve begun to glimpse the greater inner dimensions from which our usual lives emerge, and to familiarize myself with other alternate methods of perception that can be used not only to see other “worlds,” but help us deal more effectively with this one.

Just before Seth began The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book, for instance, I found myself embarked on a new venture I call the Sumari development. Sumari refers to a “family” of consciousnesses who share certain overall characteristics. There is a language involved that isn’t a language in usual terms. I think that it operates as a psychological and psychic framework that frees me from normal verbal reference, letting me express and communicate inner feelings and data that lie just beneath formalized word patterns.

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.

I know that Seven and his teacher, Cyprus, exist in certain terms, yet their reality can’t be explained either in the usual fact world. For example, the novel included many Sumari poems and portions of Speaker manuscripts; and when I sing Sumari I identify with Cyprus, who is supposed to be a fictional character. I could also tune into Seven for help with personal challenges, I discovered.

The Sumari development, along with the experiences connected with The Education of Oversoul 7 and The Nature of Personal Reality, brought up so many questions that I was forced to seek a larger framework in which to understand what was happening. As a result I’m working on a book called Aspect Psychology, which I hope will present a theory of personality large enough to contain man’s psychic nature and activities. Seth refers to Aspects, as we call it, in this present book, and it should be published sometime in 1975.

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.

Seth’s main idea is that we create our personal reality through our conscious beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world. Following this is the concept that the “point of power” is in the present, not in the past of this life or any other. He stresses the individual’s capacity for conscious action, and provides excellent exercises designed to show each person how to apply these theories to any life situation.

Seth first mentioned The Nature of Personal Reality in Session 608, April 5, 1972, only shortly after Rob and I had finished reading proofs for his previous book, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul. He actually began dictation on April 10, 1972, but our personal reality was suddenly disturbed when we were caught in the flood caused by Tropical Storm Agnes. As a result, as you’ll see in Rob’s notes, further work on the book was delayed for some time.

Seth often uses episodes from our lives as specific examples of larger issues, and our experiences with the flood served as a starting point for his discussion of personal beliefs and disasters. In several other instances he also used our life situation as his source material — an intriguing turnabout.