“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We were visited over the weekend by Robert Monroe and his wife, Nancy; they live on a farm in central Virginia. Bob Monroe is the author of Journeys Out of the Body,¹ the book that Jane and I regard as the premier work on the subject. Among many things, he wanted to tell Jane about the research complex, tentatively called The Mentronics Institute — or System — that he’s building on his farm. It will be used “by just a bunch of guys” to study various phases of psychic activity. These “guys” then will be doctors, parapsychologists, psychiatrists, and members of other scientific disciplines.

(“Sunday afternoon before our visitors came,” she wrote, “I’d begun reading a book by Ralph Waldo Emerson [the poet and philosopher who lived from 1803–82]. I came across his essay, The Poet, in which he talked about the ‘speakers’ as being those who use their inner abilities to ‘speak the inner secrets of nature.’ The essay impressed me strongly, seeming to echo elements in my own writing and psychic characteristics; and of course I thought of Seth’s ‘Speakers’ as he described them in Chapter Twenty of Seth Speaks. [According to Seth, Emerson was a Speaker too!] Then Bob Monroe and his wife arrived, and we had a busy evening. Seth came through, and so forth.

Do the Speakers live?

Their massive lives straddle ours,

but our lives are like

(“As I struggled through these, my subjective state changed to such a degree that I called Rob again. I began to sense the Speakers’ ‘massive lives,’ and I realized that I had gone beyond the poem. The inspiration was now directing my perception so that as I looked around, the world was altered. When this happens to me, this state that we think of as subjective life turns real and objective, and is then viewed in the same way that our normal physical life is.

(“From my desk in my study I faced the windows of our small kitchen. I could look through the treetops beyond them — we live on the second floor — and down to the street on the next block. Not three-dimensionally, but in another way more vividly, I … saw … sensed … massive figures standing around the edge of that physical view; and around the edges of the world. My eyes were open, of course. With my inner sight I felt that one of those forms, sturdy and impossibly massive, might bend down and with his gigantic face peek into my kitchen window … though I was also aware that all of this was my interpretation of what I was receiving.

(“At the same time, in contrast, my perception of my room underwent a transformation. Everything in it, while retaining its own size to my vision, became microscopically small and dear, like a child’s model of a world — but one that was real and living, with my rooms inside one of the innumerable toy houses. I was exhilarated yet disquieted. I tried to go along with what was happening, yet still retain a certain ‘as if’ distance so that I wouldn’t be completely lost in the experience.

(“The incredible sweetness of their songs followed me even while I found myself laughing…. For now I was touching up my nails — I’d worn off all the new polish on their edges from typing my Speaker poetry all day. And inside God or not, here I was, quite capable of thinking in such mundane terms. As I went into the living room to prepare it for guests, that room was also an inside that was an inside….”

(Echoes of Jane’s transcendent experience persisted for days. She also recalled details she had omitted from her written record — usually the memory of these was triggered by ordinary events in our daily lives.

(Pause.) In certain terms time intervals are jumped, as when a “past” smell or sight is suddenly perceived with present vividness, though you would say it has already occurred in the past. Under particular conditions a memory may suddenly become more real than the event of the present moment, and so rush again into your current experience as validly as when it was first lived, and even seem to blot out the occurrences of the moment.