“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I don’t care for the term “channeling,” since I think it too all-inclusive and already trite. However, I liked both Jim’s ideas of my doing the Preface for Jane’s book, and of publishing a photo of her. And Laurel Lee Davies, the young lady who’s now helping me carry on my publishing activities, at once intuitively picked out from my files the one right photograph of Jane to us for Seth, Dreams … Jane’s father, Delmer Roberts, took the snapshot when she was on vacation with him in Baja, California in 1951. She was twenty-two years old. Jane and I didn’t meet until 1954. That little picture, then, was taken some twelve years before she began “coming through” with the Seth material. Yet, I find in it all of the ingredients that made up the Jane I knew — her great beauty, personality and creativity, her love of manipulating within her physical environment; I see her “steering herself” toward extraordinary accomplishments.

How Seth, Dreams … eventually came to be issued by Stillpoint Publishing, how it can even be thought of as a “lost manuscript,” makes a most interesting account that I’ll just outline here. First, though, I remind the reader that Jane spoke in a trance or dissociated state for a discarnate personality who calls himself Seth; by his own definition he’s an “energy personality essence,” no longer focused within physical reality. Last July my agent, Tam Mossman, phoned to ask that I search Jane’s papers for a manuscript he remembers her submitting to him some seventeen years ago, when he had been a young editor just beginning a career with Prentice-Hall. That manuscript is Seth, Dreams and Projection of Consciousness. As soon as he’d reviewed it back then, Tam had asked Jane to do a book on Seth himself. The result? The Seth Material, for which Jane signed a contract in December 1968. The book came out in 1970; and in it she had used certain portions of Seth, Dreams …

In those terms I have my own proofs of survival, just as Jane had — and as she still does. We always had far too many questions about such matters to be satisfied with the very restrictive “answers” that our religious and secular establishments offer. I cannot believe that in matters of life and death my psyche would be so foolish as to indulge in wish fulfillment, relaying to me only those ideas it “thinks” I want to consciously know. Each time I may feel my own ignorance about even our own physical reality, let alone other realities, I fall back upon my own feelings and beliefs. I have nowhere else to turn, really, nor did Jane. As Seth told us in a number of ways (and to some extent I’m certainly paraphrasing him here), “Never accept a theory that contradicts your own experience.” Jane and I found much better answers for ourselves, even if they were — and are — only approximations of more basic, and perhaps even incomprehensible, truths. My unimpeded, creative psyche intuitively knows that positive answers to its questions exist, that otherwise it wouldn’t bother to ask those questions within nature’s marvelous framework, that nature is alive and, as best we can sensually conceive of it, eternal. My psyche knows that it makes no sense within nature’s context for the human personality to be obliterated upon physical death.

When I got up at 6:15 A.M. I hurried to write down this most significant account, and begin my interpretation of it. (Seth wasn’t available, so I couldn’t ask him to do it for me!)

But that night, Mark insisted that Seth had read his mind and listened spellbound as Seth told him about the inner senses. None of us suspected that Seth would give Mark detailed information about the inner organization for which he worked, or help him understand personal problems, or delight in telling him what had gone on at sales conferences that Mark had already attended — or with a great rush of humor tell him the exact amount of a new raise he had just been given. [...]

And as your dreams originate with you, rise from you, attain a seeming independence and have their ending with you, so do the entity’s personalities arise from him, attain various degrees of independence and return to him while never leaving him for an instant.

[...] I was in trance, of course, but, knowing him, I can well imagine how he must have stared at me as I strode back and forth speaking in that deep Seth voice and talking to Rob in such a manner. [...]

“You’re just running yourself down when you think thoughts like that,” Rob said, when I told him.

[...] I looked at him fully in the face, running ahead of him, ready to confront him with “What’s the matter with you?” But, instead, I realized that he didn’t see me. [...]

She did not remember him … as she taught his children. [...] But beyond this, Miss Cunningham’s present personality has been gently disentangling itself from this plane of reality — and she simply did not remember him.

[...] I thought: “I might as well ask him about Miss Cunningham anyway, regardless of what’s going on.” [...] I walked over to him and said, “Hi Sam. [...]

“You should call Sam and ask him where he was when you saw him,” Rob said.

The fact is that although no one taught him to see, he sees. The part of himself that did ‘teach’ him to see still guides his movements, still moves the muscles of his eyes, still becomes conscious despite him when he sleeps, still breathes for him without thanks or recognition and still carries on his task of transforming energy from an inner reality into an outer one. [...]

[...] In those days, I’d put him on probation and myself as well. And I never tried to visualize him. [...]

If man does not know who breathes within him, and if man does not know who dreams within him, it is not because there is one self who acts in the physical universe and another who dreams and breathes. [...]

[...] With no transition or advance notice, a vision appeared to him. [...]

Much of the session had been directed to him. He sat, taking notes, as Seth dictated, stopping now and then to stare at him as he made a point. [...]

[...] I’ll ask him to comment, if he doesn’t on his own.”

[...] While Rob’s back was vastly improved since Seth’s reincarnational sessions for him, he still had some bad days now and then. [...]

[...] We’d purchased the rocker earlier when Rob’s back was bothering him badly. [...]

I stared at him. He meant it.
I knew him well enough to know.
I said as defiantly as I could, “It’s only a game.
Besides, we don’t know any Seth.”

[...] And it was in the middle of the eighth session that I began to speak for him. [...]

[...] Someone said you knew him.”

[...] In prehistoric times, mankind evolved the ego to help him deal with camouflage patterns that he had, himself, created. [...] The inner senses led him into a reality he could not manipulate as easily as he could physical camouflage, and he feared what he thought of as a loss of mastery.

[...] “If Seth doesn’t mention my experiences, I’m going to interrupt and ask him,” Rob said. He was still having back trouble, and now a spasm seized him so that he grimaced. [...]

[...] We were somewhat tired, but glad to see him. [...] I thought sardonically, “A guest from another layer of reality is one thing, but do you really want your friends to meet him?” Finally my nervousness was so apparent that Rob asked me what was wrong. [...]

[...] He wants his answers given to him in a way that his conscious mind can understand. [...]

[...] But on this particular night, Rob watched, amused, while Seth told him in no uncertain terms what he thought of my experiment — using my own lips to do it! [...]

[...] He seemed so sure of himself and of the material; I envied him.