“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.

Unless I “turn into Seth,” go the whole way, alter my very psychological alignment — unless Seth smiles and speaks — there is no Seth material. So although only two people are in our living room on session nights, it’s also quite fair to say that we aren’t alone.

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.

Yet I can’t remember offhand what happened in my normal daily life during those past days, either. So “real” time and trance time have each vanished: And this week I’ll go into trance, and again Seth will dictate part of another book that Rob will be typing up for publication a year or so from now. Then, this today will also be part of the past. In our terms.

I say: “In our terms,” because the sessions themselves seem ever-present, despite all I’ve just said. They seem to contain an energy that comes alive in Seth’s words, so that they belong to the future as well as to the past. Those words were all originally spoken, spontaneously and emphatically, though slowly enough for Rob to take notes. They were enunciated in Seth’s own peculiarly accented tones; accompanied by gestures in a living performance that I hope the reader will keep in mind.

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.

As most of our readers know, Seth began calling me Ruburt, and my husband, Rob, Joseph, early in the sessions. He explained that these were our entity names, and I was half amused to have a male one, and to find Seth referring to me as “he” or “him.” When I had classes, Seth gave many students their entity names also, and there was much lively discussion over the names’ sexual designations.

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.”

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.

The implications of such statements for education are astonishing: Besides teaching rote information, our schools and universities should acquaint us with as many fields as possible; for these act as exterior triggers, bringing forth natural inner knowledge, sparking skills which are waiting for activation by suitable stimuli in the exterior world.

That book, The World View of Paul Cézanne, was published by Prentice-Hall in 1977. No sooner had I finished it, than another, similar experience happened, just as Seth was completing Psyche. The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James came the same way, like mental dictation; only where the Cézanne world view had specialized in art, the James world view was more comprehensive. It commented in depth upon our world since James’s death, and covered American history as it was related to spiritualism, psychology, and democracy.

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.

Seth maintains that inner information often comes into our minds, though it is sifted through our individual psyches and tinted by our own lives so that frequently we never recognize its source. Sometimes this happens in dreams or as inspiration: Inventors, for example, might be receiving a given idea from the future, or an archaeologist might make a discovery as the result of receiving information from the past.

Seth maintains that our inner knowledge usually merges so smoothly with our present concerns that we seldom recognize its source, yet it provides the individual and the species with a reliable, constant stream of information through a psychological lifeline to which we are each connected.

He discusses in depth the experience of early man and the different organizations of perception that prevailed, and stresses that the species has always had access to “inner data” so that its source of knowledge was never exclusively dependent upon exterior circumstances. According to Seth, it is from this interior body of knowledge that our systemized, objective, information-storing social processes emerge.