“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“You don’t need any. Which would you rather do?” I joked. “Start a new book or give birth to a child?”

— no Preface. Chapter One: You come into the condition you call life, and pass out of it. In between you encounter a lifetime. Suspended — or so it certainly seems — between birth and death, you wonder at the nature of your own being. You search your experience and study official histories of the past, hoping to find there clues as to the nature of your own reality.

Your life seems synonymous with your consciousness. Therefore it appears that your knowledge of yourself grows gradually, as your self-consciousness develops from your birth. It appears, furthermore, that your consciousness will meet a death beyond which your self-consciousness will not survive. You may think longingly and with an almost hopeful nostalgia of the religion of your childhood, and remember a system of belief that ensured you of immortality. Yet most of you, my readers, yearn for some private and intimate assurances, and seek for some inner certainty that your own individuality is not curtly dismissed at death.

You do not remember your birth, as a rule. Certainly it seems that you do not remember the birth of the world. You had a history, however, before your birth — even as it seems to you that the world had a history before you were born.

I am writing this book through a personality known as Jane Roberts. That is the name given her at her birth. She shares with you the triumphs and travails of physical existence. (A one-minute pause.) Like you, she is presented with a life that seems to begin at her birth, and that is suspended from that point of emergence until the moment of death’s departure. She has asked the same questions that you ask in your quiet moments.

I can only write a portion of this book. You must complete it. For “The Psyche” is meaningless except as it relates to the individual psyche. I speak to you from levels of yourself that you have forgotten, and yet not forgotten. I speak to you through the printed page, and yet my words will rearouse within you the voices that spoke to you in your childhood, and before your birth.

Where is the television drama before it appears on your channel — and where does it go afterwards? How can it exist one moment and be finished the next, and yet be replayed when the conditions are correct? If you understood the mechanics, you would know that the program obviously does not go anywhere. It simply is, while the proper conditions activate it for your attention. In the same way, you are alive whether or not you are playing on an earth “program.” You are, whether you are in time or out of it.