“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.