“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.

Many correspondents write, commenting on the dramatic element of the sessions, and surely the entire affair is a richly evocative psychological drama. Most people, however, don’t realize the time or work required to keep up with Seth’s seemingly endless creativity: the sessions to be typed, the various stages of manuscript preparation, or the simple persistence necessary, so that the sessions continue despite life’s normal distractions.

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.

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.

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 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.