“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Miss Cunningham had been preparing herself for her own departure since she heard of the possible operations. Yet consciously, she was ignorant of her own inner decision.

Of course, the conscious mind cannot be aware of such critical inner decisions. … The disentanglement of her personality has been gentle and gradual. She is focusing less and less in this plane of reality, and again, gradually, she will begin to focus in another. There is a period of adjustment after leaving any plane, although yours involves the most difficulty since your camouflage pattern is unusually rigid.

All kinds of questions came into Rob’s mind. When Seth paused for a moment, he asked, “You said once that the shock of birth was worse than the shock of death. Why?”

So the first spring of the sessions came, a cold bright March. Miss Cunningham’s apartment door became a stimulus to my constant questions. Every time I passed it, I wondered again: Was she transferring her consciousness to another level of reality? Would she survive death when it came, in meaningful terms? And behind all these questions there was the big one: Was Seth really a personality who had survived death? And would I really ever know?

I wasn’t about to close off the Seth material until I made up my mind, though. Another possibility was always in the back of my thoughts. Suppose I stopped having the sessions while I tried to figure things out, then decided that Seth was right on all counts — and found I just couldn’t have sessions again? That, to me, would be the worst possibility of all — that I might close off knowledge out of uncertainity. So I kept on.

A few days after the last session, I sat in my small office at the art gallery, looking out at the landscaped yard. That afternoon it was difficult to keep my mind on my work. People were coming and going in the hallways. Had they lived before? Was their consciousness born anew, and was it really something quite independent of the images they wore?

I wrote four more poems of varying merit about that one event and behind the whole affair was defiant recognition of the value of any consciousness, whatever its form. And the deeper question: Why was it ever annihilated, at least in our terms? Why was life constructed to be destroyed? I knew, even then, that I had to find my own answers — that each of us does. And yet at that point, I felt duty-bound to question my own experiences, Seth and the sessions because I refused to hide in self-delusions.

Unknowingly, in my poetry I had barely begun to form some concepts that would help me. Just before the sessions began the idea of “The Idiot” came to me as a symbol of inner truth that appears to be complete nonsense to the reasoning mind at times; or at best, highly impractical in normal living. I’d written two poems on the idea, and the day after the starlings were killed, I did another:

The inner senses operate on all planes and under all circumstances. The outer senses vary according to plane and circumstance. The outer senses are dependable only in terms of the definite system of reality for which they were constructed. Their purpose, of course, is to enable the conscious personality to recognize as valid, camouflage patterns that are only valid under certain conditions. …

She stayed here several months, without ever showing any signs of violent behavior. But her mind deteriorated more and more. She thought she was getting threatening letters.

During this period I was trying the psychological time exercises suggested by Seth, and often, just when I got started, Miss Cunningham would interrupt me. One day I went into the bedroom where it was quiet, closed my eyes, lay down and began clearing my mind of thoughts for my psy-time exercise. Several times Miss Cunningham came to mind: I wanted to ask her doctor about her condition but hesitated because I wasn’t a member of her family.

All kinds of thoughts flooded to my mind. Consciousness was independent of the body — Seth was right — and if that was true, then there was no reason why he couldn’t be what he said he was: an independent personality, out of the flesh. But why hadn’t I caught on sooner? And why hadn’t I run up to see if the house mailbox had a name on it? I couldn’t wait till Rob came home so I could tell him what happened.

Yet, as badly as I wanted to check this out, I just couldn’t bring myself to call Dr. Levine. “He’ll think I was out of my mind instead of out of my body,” I said. “And what excuse could I use? If I knew what the street was, I could at least say, ‘I thought I saw you on such-and-such a street.’ “

“Well, I know I was out of my body. That’s what counts as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “In that ‘Idea Construction’ thing I didn’t seem to have a body — I seemed to just be my consciousness. So I never made any connection at first between the two experiences. …