“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

On Friday, October 9, 1970, I received a letter from a reader, Peg Boyles, about my book The Seth Material. With it she included an excerpt from Living Time by Maurice Nicoll, and another from a manuscript by Alice Bailey. We were expecting company that night. After dinner I watched “Mission Impossible” on television and began reading the Nicoll exerpts which were on probabilities. I did not even look at the Bailey material. The Nicoll pages intrigued me, and I thought of asking Seth about some of Nicoll’s ideas.

A few days later, on October 17, Sue had a dream in which Seth described probabilities in more personal terms. The following is from her notes:

Suddenly I am yanked away from this scene, and Carl [Sue’s husband] and I are sitting in a large room with Jane as Seth. Seth turns to Carl and gives him a long lecture. Carl smiles at him, and Seth says, ‘Now at the count of three, you will go into a deeper trance.’ Carl begins to do so. I lie down on the couch and say, ‘Wow, to be out at the count of three?’ I close my eyes.

Seth touches my shoulder, smiling. He tells me that I am to do something else and gives me a long, friendly lecture. The content is lost now, but I think it had to do with my own psychic development. Then Seth says, ‘In the earlier dream demonstration tonight, your father had problems of his own, and you ignored them. The whole house was aware of your feelings and absorbed them. It will be aware of them for some time.’

On hearing this, I feel sorry and eerie, as I imagine the house actually absorbing my ill feelings. Seth then says that I can do the whole scene over by a simple method of stepping sideways into physical reality; he tells me that this is easier than I might suppose.

Using a series of mental exercises explained to me by Seth, I do step sideways — it is as though I am squeezing between two bars, and I find myself back in the bedroom with my father there, again, complaining. This time I change the events from the way they happened the first time, realize how important his problems are to him, smile and send him good thoughts. At once I am propelled into another, similar scene.

In this experience, it is Thanksgiving Day. My mother’s family is here also. I am in the sunroom watching my father take food from a buffet set in the dining room. My mother and her sister are in there, talking. Suddenly my father becomes angry, throws his plate onto the rug and grabs another. My mother begins to cry. I remember probabilities, however, and instead of becoming upset myself, I send my father thoughts of peace and health. I know that now the scene will not happen this Thanksgiving in physical reality — that I have helped choose another more positive one. The scene ends. I feel as though I have been both watching and participating. I hear Seth remark: ‘You learn well, and manipulate equally well.’

I half waken and then drift into a recurring scene from an old childhood dream: There is a killer fog behind us, and we must get down a snowy path to home before the fog gets us. We are struggling past a large factory, when all at once I am sitting with Jane as Seth again, watching the snow dream as if it were a movie. I say, ‘Of course,’ and realize that I can relieve the people in the snow. Suddenly I feel the shell of my physical body for what it is — my own creation — and am aware of how much more I am. I go back into the snow scene. We all make the safety of the house, and I wish all the characters in the dream peace and safety from the killer fog. They will never have to fear it again. I wake up.

(NOTES CONNECTED WITH DREAM: I had the feeling that this was a demonstration of the many ramifications of probabilities in physical reality and in the dream state. Seth seemed to be an old friend there in a gentle, guiding way; almost as if he were a film projectionist, directing the film or experiences.)

In our next class, Seth commented on Sue’s dream:

A few nights earlier, another student, Shirley, just missed having an out-of-body experience. In the last class, Seth had told the students that he would help those who were ready to project. Shirley felt Seth nearby a few nights later and was just about to leave her body when she got frightened and held back.

When Seth finished speaking to Sue, he said to Shirley,

He spoke with such rich understanding humor that everyone laughed, including Shirley. Through this entire period, Seth spoke on probabilities in our own private sessions, as well as in class. He was halfway through his own book, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul which he is completing now and in which he gives further methods that can be used to experience probable realities.

I look up and notice an older, short, stout man in a dark purple robe of some sort sitting across from us and realize with a jolt that it is Seth! I say, ‘Do you know him?’ and point. Jane laughs. ‘You mean old Saint Nick over there?’ I (whatever one it is) cringe.

I feel very protective of them. Somehow, I begin a discussion of the Seth Material with them and go into a talk on physical reality and such, and discover that a few years ago, they had received some strange messages through Jane from ‘someone claiming to be a dead spirit.’ ‘But it was ridiculous,’ Jane says, ‘so we dropped it.’

‘Look,’ I say, ‘You and I are in the dream state. I am from another probability system. You know me there. In mine, you kept on with the “messages” and found — I glance at Seth, who is smiling — ‘they were from him and you went on to discover fantastic things about life.’

I nod and we walk out of the restaurant — Seth trailing along behind. We walk down a shaded, quiet street and turn in at a large white house with a screened lower porch. There is a large tree to the left of the porch, and a weedy driveway leads back to a large white barnish-looking building with double top-hinged doors. We go up a set of outside stairs and into an apartment which seems to have a large living room. Rob is about to haul out some paintings — they seem to be landscapes — when he groans in agony and nearly falls down in pain from his back, apparently. He manages to lie down on the floor and I try to show him some yoga exercises for it, but he brushes me off. I suddenly feel desperate to do something for them before it all ends.

After Sue read the dream to me, I didn’t know what to say. The York Beach couple! With odd feelings of disquiet I let myself remember. The episode is included in The Seth Material, but it was one of the strangest events of our lives.

After the Seth sessions began, Seth told us that we, ourselves, had created the images of the couple, projected all of our negative attitudes into them and then reacted. I didn’t know what to think of this explanation at the time. Later as we explained the nature of personality and its creative potentials, I saw that this was precisely what we had done.

Seth told us that such images have a definite reality, but we certainly weren’t prepared to hear that someone else encountered our York Beach selves in a dream! “To create them with all our negative feelings was bad enough,” I said to Sue, “but then to cast them loose on their own!”

“Ask Seth about it,” Sue said. It happened to be a session night night anyway, and without being asked, Seth suspended dictation on his own book to give us the following explanation:

Now, this is not dictation [on Seth’s own book], but it is some material that Ruburt can use in his dream book. I want to comment, therefore, on the experience of your friend, Sue Watkins, and its connection with the probable universe.

(Seth gestured humorously enough, but then quieted and leaned forward in a mood of emphatic seriousness.)