“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.

My own imperfect recollection following Tam’s request that I look for it was that Seth, Dreams … was an unfinished collection of records, ideas, and chapters that Jane had struggled with for several years, without selling it. Instead, what I found in a box in the basement was, to my amazement, a completed manuscript — a full book ready to go, one as fresh as it had ever been, and my wife had struggled with it. What emerged as Laurel Davies and I searched Jane’s and my records, including early Seth sessions, was a long story of our doubts and gropings in an area in which we had no guidance except for our own explorations. Seth, Dreams … was rejected by three major publishers while Jane worked on it during 1966-67. She was still an unknown in the field; by mid-1966 she’d had only one small psychic book, How to Develop Your ESP Power, published. Our subject of interest itself was largely denied validity by the social, psychological, and scientific establishments. We were still operating alone, then, even though Jane had been speaking for Seth for about three years. In spite of all of her questions, however, her strong creative vitality — her intuitive insistence upon using her most unusual abilities — kept her focusing ahead, and I helped her as much as I could. I’m still astonished when I think of what Jane was to accomplish in the next few years.

Without taking into account here the essences of other life forms, do I think the human personality survives physical death? Considering the loving, passionate “work” that Jane and I engaged in for more than twenty years, of course I do. No other answer makes intuitive or consciously reasonable sense to me. I think it quite psychologically and psychically limiting to believe otherwise, for such beliefs can only impede or postpone our further conscious understanding of the individual and mass realities — the overall “nature” — we’re creating. I think that all of us seek answers, and that our searches are expressed in our very lives.

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.

[...] “The Seth material could be coming from some deep inner source, an intuitive bank of inner knowledge available to everyone if they only look for it,” I said. [...]

I have described those early sessions elsewhere, but here I’m including, instead, a poem that is a dramatic, intuitive statement about my feelings at the time. [...]

[...] Quite unknowingly, I set one side of myself — the intellectual — as a watchdog against the intuitive portions of the self. [...]

[...] We were both completely unacquainted with such ideas, yet, intuitively, we accepted them. [...]