“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t apply what we learn to the ordinary world. Certainly I’m trying to do that, and Seth wrote this book to help people deal more effectively with their daily lives. I am insisting that we must be very careful about making literal interpretations, lest we limit a multidimensional phenomenon by tying it down to a three-dimensional fact system.

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.

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.

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.

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.