“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

And in all of this, as always, Seth stresses probabilities as playing a vital role in the development of the individual and the species, and as representing the basis for free will. He sees the psyche experimenting privately with probable actions in the dream state, and envisions humanity’s mass dreams as providing an inner vehicle by which man chooses global events. The psyche is private, yet all in all, each psyche contains access to the public psyche.

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.

At this writing, Seth is nearly halfway through The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which will show where and how private beliefs become public events. I’ve finished for publication Emir’s Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers (the entire first chapter came in a dream), and The Further Education of Oversoul Seven. All of this, Seth’s books and my own, surely gives evidence of the psyche’s vast creativity, and of its abilities to perceive and use information that comes from the inner, as well as from the exterior environment.