“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Is Seth actually my trance personality, though — a native of timeless psychological realms, who sends his messages to our time-tinted world? Or am I Seth’s trance personality, living in space and time, nearly forgetful of my heritage? Perhaps I’ll never really know. My continuing experiences, however, show me that Seth’s personality is stamped upon the sessions and his writings, and perhaps also upon my own consciousness, in unique ways.

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.

Rob typed Seth’s other books, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, The Nature of Personal Reality, and the two volumes of The “Unknown” Reality, added his own notes, and did almost all the work of preparing them for publication. He was still working on The “Unknown” Reality when Seth finished this present book. Then almost immediately Seth began another, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events.

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.

In Psyche, Seth addresses himself to the matter of human sexuality for the first time in his published works, discussing it as it relates to the private and mass psyche, and connecting sexuality with its spiritual and biological sources.

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.”

While Seth dictated this book, devoted to the potentials of the psyche and its reception of inner information, my own experiences — as usual — seemed to serve as object lessons backing up his thesis. Seth had barely begun Psyche, for instance, when I suddenly became the psychic recipient of a book on art philosophy and techniques. It purported to come from the “world view” of Paul Cézanne, the famous French artist who died at the start of this century.

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.