“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The words were simply there, completely intrusive as far as I was concerned. I’d been scowling at the dirty pot and thinking of my company. “What?” I said.

Surprised, I went to my table and sat down with a paper and pen. The words returned exactly as before, and I wrote them down. I “knew” they were comments on what I had read — or additions. One page of written material followed, given in the same way. Groups of words were just popped into my mind. No more than a sentence came until that was written down.

I was totally alert and critical at the time, focused at a high point of concentration, though, in that all of my attention was pivoted expectantly. The experience was fascinating and increasingly enjoyable. Earlier, I’d sipped beer as I watched television. Now the half-full glass was beside me. I drank some now and then, and also smoked. A strong sense of exhilaration was present, as was the feeling of great energy. There was no feeling that any particular personality was giving me the information, yet there was the certainity that the words were being delivered from somewhere or someone outside my own reality. They didn’t seem to well up from inside me, but to be dropped down into my head.

As I finished the first page, Rob came out, passed me and went into the kitchen. I was surprised that he didn’t know without being told, as he usually does, that something was going on, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Finally I managed to say, “Hon, don’t bother me.” It took great effort for me to withdraw that much energy away from what I was doing. But, instead of understanding, Rob began emptying the garbage into paper bags. The crinkley sound seemed magnified tremendously and had a new dimension as if it were ripping up space, crinkling the edges of space in the kitchen. Later, Rob said that he never heard me speak to him and questioned whether I’d really spoken. I thought I had, of course.

I wanted to cry, and for a moment I almost did — to be so interrupted. Rob went on bagging the garbage. It seemed now that we were separated by a great distance that had nothing to do with space. I couldn’t bridge it just then to explain what was happening or to ask him to stop. He went out and returned after emptying the garbage. The kids downstairs, full of fun, began yelling with great energy on the porch. Finally, the sounds quieted. I waited.

Nearly three more pages of dictation followed, coming in the same way as before. Because of the nature of the material, I thought I might be shown how to enter a probable moment from the present one. Initial instructions were given, though only preliminary, but I was ready to follow them. Now the speaker was addressing me, where the earlier monologue had been impersonal. At this point, unfortunately, our company arrived. I was really disappointed, but shook my consciousness to set it back to daily things, and with only a moment of reorientation attended to my guests.

(Here came the first interruption. … Rob came into the kitchen. The dictation stops, or rather, it was still there, but I couldn’t get it. It resumed after the interruption:)

Along with the last sentence, I saw an image that is difficult to explain. It was a rectangular object that reminded me of a gadget shown to us once by Jim Beal from NASA that reacted to light and another that reacted to pressure. Both of those gadgets turned all colors and achieved different stages of transparency and opaqueness. So did the object I saw now. It was supposed to represent the moment as we perceive it. The center section of the rectangle was most opaque and the ends most transparent. There were new bursts of noise from downstairs at this point, and the image vanished.

The next morning I typed up the material and went to check the title of the Nicoll book. Then I saw the Alice Bailey excerpt and read it. I was in for a surprise. It contained her description of the method used in scripts she received, and the description fitted my experience so closely that she could have been speaking for me as well.

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.’

(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.)

Sue couldn’t wait to tell me about the dream. We were both pleasantly astonished. Probable realities seemed like such an esoteric idea that we really hadn’t hoped for much practical experience with it. But you’ll see shortly, this was only the beginning.

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.

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.

In the meantime, Sue began to have a series of dreams dealing with probabilities, the first of them in August, 1970. She wrote the dream down as usual, and called me on the phone to tell me about it. I was astonished. As she read the dream, all kinds of images and ideas came into my mind.

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.’

(Could these have been the York Beach couple? Or was it a simple learning method? I am filled with the conviction that this was legitimate.)

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.

It happened some months before our first psychic experiences. Rob was ill, and we were vacationing in Maine. One night we went to a nightclub, hoping for a change of mood. Rob could hardly walk, his back hurt him so badly. The room was small and crowded, the tables were all full, and the band blared. Suddenly, I noticed an older couple sitting across from us. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. As if hypnotized, I sat staring.

They looked like bloated, bitter copies of us, at a later age. The woman was much stouter than I but bore a striking resemblance to me. The man could have been Rob’s twin, but older, with a face marked by disillusion. They frightened me badly. I kept thinking, “God, we could end up looking like that,” and, in a strange way, I felt that they were us, in some terrible future.

I poked Rob, and told him what I thought. Then suddenly he just stood up, said, “Let’s dance,” and dragged me out onto the dance floor. A moment earlier I’d seen him grimace with pain. The band was playing a twist, and we didn’t know the dance. For that matter, up to that point we hadn’t gone out much and rarely danced. I resisted, but Rob wouldn’t take no for an answer — very uncharacteristic of him.

Later the couple just disappeared as far as we were concerned. We thought they might have left while we weren’t watching them. But from that night on, Rob began to improve. We danced all night, and now dancing is one of our favorite activities. We knew that something had happened very important to our lives, but we had no idea what was really involved.

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!”

The experience was quite legitimate, and it was meant as a lesson on many levels. First of all, it is apparent that there is communication between various systems of probabilities and that actions in one system can and do affect the other.

The couple do exist, probable selves of your own in a different system. Your friend, in developing her own abilities, has become involved with activities in probable fields and was drawn to the couple emotionally because of her emotional connection with you in this system.

At the same time, the experience was meant as a moral lesson to your Sue Watkins. She sees you in a physical reality as people she respects and admires. Through the probable experience, she was able to see what could have happened to you in this system, had you given in to negative thoughts and feelings and not been persistent in your work and efforts.

At York Beach, originally. They contained, therefore, all of your fears, for you foresaw that in this system you could become such people — not that this was inevitable, but definitely probable and more than possible.

Having created them because of your abilities, you then perceived them as objectified apparitions in physical reality, when Ruburt immediately made the conscious comparison, and resolved that you should never end up looking like them … or filled with the bitterness that was written in their faces. The conscious notice, therefore, was all you knew of the deep unconscious creative endeavor and psychological mechanism that brought them into existence.

That Robert Butts did not continue his painting with any purpose, trying to be objective and sensible, lacking the understanding of his parents that you have achieved through sessions. He put security in financial terms above everything, took no chances at all along those lines, and despite this, of course, is not making much money because his heart was, with the painting, most largely abandoned.

You had planned for this as a temporary arrangement — six months, at most, to save money — then you were going to paint full time. Instead, however, you stayed, supposedly to aid your parents, but this was largely an excuse because you were afraid to take the chance and paint full-time and also afraid to give up the regular money, even though you had no rent to pay.

There is no need to go further into their history, but I assure you that it was in keeping with the characteristics that you gave them; and remember, these were your own strongest fears. With all of this however latent, you see, they had your potential. I was able to make an inadequate but definite contact, and their existence can still be changed and altered, for they have free will, as you do.

This was the next line of your development, however. You cleared away debris. You gave yourselves psychic breathing space so that your creative abilities could arise, and saw that the way was open for our sessions to begin.