“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As I write this Introduction, I’ve already forgotten those many anonymous nights during which Seth, my trance personality, dictated this book. Only the session notes taken by my husband, Robert Butts, tell me what particular daily events we were engaged in during the time of the book’s production. One thing is certain: On session nights I went into trance and, as Seth, dictated these chapters. The triumphs and defeats of any given day have more or less vanished, but those nightly hours are somehow contained in these pages, and to that extent they endure.

I know very well that there were evenings when I “should” have held our regular Seth session, but didn’t, for reasons also forgotten. Perhaps I didn’t feel up to par, or sat at my desk, involved in my own writing. Perhaps an unbidden guest dropped by, or holidays intruded. Actually, I was quite concerned with the quick passage of time, and the pressure to prepare manuscripts for publication. During the period that Seth was dictating this book, Rob was typing the two volumes of Seth’s previous work, The “Unknown” Reality, and adding innumerable notes that correlated Seth’s material with that of his earlier books. I knew that on session nights, Rob “lost” his work time on that project, and he still had to type up the latest book session on the following day, while all I had to do was … what? Turn into Seth.

I’d been producing my own books during this time, and getting them ready for publication, so surely Seth wasn’t taking up any creative slack of my own. Still, I stared at Psyche when Seth finished it, wishing that he could type, too! I thought back to all of those unremembered trance hours, looking at them from a different standpoint — and almost startled by a simple thought that just hadn’t occurred to me in quite that way before: Those trance hours were productive. They yielded results in the world of time. That trance consciousness, by whatever name, knew what it was doing. And I wondered: What must I look like to Rob as I leaned forward as Seth, smiling, (my glasses off, Seth’s eyes darker than mine), joking as Seth, gesturing, waiting while Rob got me (Jane), a beer? I’m sure there is a kind of trance memory, but my ordinary memory records very little of those trance hours.

Piles of trance hours! Here they are. But if I was in trance, was Seth also? He certainly is alert, active, responsive, concerned about people individually and in general, and about the world. And yet I feel that only a portion of his consciousness is here during sessions — the part expressed through me — so that whatever the nature of Seth’s native experience, his performance in our world only hints of a psychological complexity quite beyond our present understanding.

Now we discover that such references were tailored to our own rather limited ideas of the qualities assigned to the sexes, for in Psyche Seth makes it clear that the psyche is not male or female, “but a bank from which sexual affiliations are drawn.” He stresses the bisexual nature of humanity and the importance of bisexuality, both spiritually and biologically.

But Seth’s bisexuality is a far vaster concept than the ones usually suggested by that term, and he sees it as a basic source from which our sexual definitions arise. What are those definitions? How many are basic, and how many learned? It is to such questions that Seth addresses himself. More: He ties in his discussion of sexuality with the birth of languages and the nature of “the hidden God.”

The psyche is not only the repository for sexual affiliation, however, but contains hidden abilities and characteristics which are then triggered into activity by exterior stimuli. In Chapter 3 of Psyche Seth says: “Certainly mathematical formulas are not imprinted in the brain, yet they are inherent in the structure of the brain, and implied within its existence.”

According to Seth, our own desires, focuses, and intents dictate what inner information we draw from the endless fields available; for he sees all knowledge existing at once, not as dry data or records, but enlivened by the consciousness that perceives it. The minds of the past and future are open to us, or at least their contents are, not in a parasitic relationship but in a lively give-and-take, in which knowledge from each time period enriches every other historical era. Seth gives this pooling of knowledge both a spiritual and biological reality.

Seth began discussing world views in his “Unknown” Reality. Simply put, a world view is a living psychological picture of an individual life, with its knowledge and experience, which remains responsive and viable long after the physical life itself is over. So, the material I received didn’t come from Paul Cézanne per se, but from his world view.

Actually, while getting the book, I felt like a secretary taking mental dictation. But what dictation! For this manuscript not only presented a fascinating picture of a genius at work, but gave specialized knowledge of a field — art — in which I am at best an amateur. Seth himself did the Introduction, first dictating his own material on Psyche, then switching over to the Cézanne Introduction during the same sessions.

According to Seth any of us can tune in to such “extra” information, but we would receive it in accordance with our own desires and intents. My own interest in art and Rob’s appreciation of Cézanne’s works helped trigger the Cézanne book, for example; and my own curiosity about William James and Rob’s appreciation of his work helped bring about the James manuscript.

As Seth makes clear, however, this book is not a dry treatise about “the psyche,” but is constructed in such a way that it will put each reader in more direct contact with his or her individual psyche. It includes many exercises to acquaint each person with that deeper portion of the self, and invites the reader to search into his or her ideas and experiences on many levels.

We were most eager to get this particular material to the public, since many correspondents write requesting Seth’s views on sexuality. This desire, coupled with Seth’s seemingly endless creativity, led us to a decision: From now on, the Seth books will carry far fewer notes. In the two volumes of The “Unknown” Reality, Rob tried to correlate Seth’s views on various subjects, tracing them backward to his earlier books (and often to unpublished material), showing the context in which the books were written. Now we will include usual session notes, but the reader will have to keep track of the development of the theories or correlate them with previous Seth books at his or her leisure.