“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane described her altered state of consciousness to me while it was in progress on Monday, of course, then the next morning she wrote as complete an account of it as she could. This took over six thousand words — and even while typing she found herself reliving portions of the experience to some moderate degree….

(“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.

(“As I sat at my desk the next morning, April 2, I was suddenly filled with the strongest, most vivid kind of inspiration I think I’ve ever had. I was swept along by it all day long, writing in a fever, agitated yet exultant. The result was a nine-page poem called Dialogues of the Speakers, which may or may not continue into a book. This is the way the book of poetry that I finished early in March, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time, began.

(“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.

(“I felt claustrophobic for a bit … my visual perception was again altered in a strange smoother way, so that everything I saw was an inside that was inside itself, ad infinitum. I felt dwarfed. But almost immediately came the oddest feeling of fantastic security, and I realized that being inside God … we were literally made of God-stuff and were therefore eternal.

(“Next came the feeling that this inside quality was so inconceivably vast that within it was all of the ever-expanding ‘space’ possible; only an inside could possess those characteristics of constant expansion.

(“Each of these ideas came as emotional revelations, accompanied by various bodily sensations and alterations of visual perception. In here other experiences began, and to different degrees I did get lost in them. One involved my body becoming massive — not as if it was massive, but massive itself. To all intents and purposes I was massive, lying there. I expanded in some way, rising higher….”

(Jane then experienced a whole series of events involving various facets of the concept of massiveness. While these were perfectly “real” to her physically, she also knew that they were symbolic interpretations of inner realities. We think the cellular memory that Seth describes was also involved, as witness these excerpts from her account:

(“…the next thing I knew I was back in bed, but massive again, and for a moment frightened: My left hand, above me on the pillow, had turned into an eagle’s claw. My eyes were closed, but as far as physical sensation was concerned that’s what it was. I felt this fantastic power in my hand; it tried to grip as an eagle’s claw would. I felt … the weirdest kind of … armor, the alien yet tough and resilient claw instead of flesh in our terms. Then my shoulders and the whole top area of my back began to turn into a great eagle, wings flapping; the surging power and alien sensations were astounding….

(“In a process impossible to describe, another change took place. This time I was a dinosaur. I mean, I WAS one. I stood on two legs, making loud, hoarse and guttural noises of … exultation as I stood upon a great plain. There was a similarity between the eagle and the dinosaur in that body armor or whatever, that strange toughness … these were all stages that I had been through — or at least that some of the cells in my body remembered — but the immediacy was very vivid on my part….

(“Rob called me, then left to pick up the Monroes at the hotel. I felt exhilarated to a high degree, yet exhausted. I began to dress, still aware of the inside-God feeling. The birds began to sing outside and I stopped, transfixed. The birds were the gods singing! This wasn’t a symbolic or artistic sensation — this was sudden known fact!

(“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.

(No session was held Monday evening. Instead Jane used her “own” abilities to tune in on the diagram of a machine that Bob Monroe drew; he had seen this on one of his out-of-body journeys. Questions involving physics arose — the Fermi gap [having to do with the movement of certain electrons], and so forth — and Jane ended up drawing diagrams of her own. She enjoys using her abilities this way.

(11:20. Jane said that while in trance she hadn’t been aware that her delivery had been slow at times — yet she seemed to recall these fluctuations when I asked her about them. She thought Seth was “trying to couch the stuff in terms that would make sense to someone who didn’t know much about such things, while keeping it of interest to a physicist, say — which wasn’t easy to do. There was a lot more about synapses and neurons, and things like that, that he didn’t put in….”

(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.

In your terms that event may never come to pass, however, because it may be arising from a probable past that was once your present, but from which you have diverged. This is one of the reasons why psychics’ predictions often do not seem to bear out, for at every point you do indeed have the free will, through your beliefs, to alter your experience.