“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A small group surrounded us — the producer and assistant producer, Jack, Sonja and the camera men. I looked at Rob with a touch of dismay because while I’d reassured Jack that everything was quite normal, actually something was different this time: I felt as if I’d been in a plane going incredibly fast, only to be yanked suddenly to a halt. Such a tremendous amount of energy surged through me that I didn’t know what to do. For a moment it sent me reeling, and Jack caught my arm. This only embarrassed me further. I could feel my cheeks flush. I always tried to behave very sensibly to show that a trance was not a strange but a very natural phenomenon, and so my momentary stagger caught me by surprise. Rob was beside me in a moment, and I explained how I felt. A taxi was already waiting to take us to our next show, a radio program. I grabbed my bun and coffee and took them with me.

It is not a neutral energy but one of strong emotional impact, reassuring, and in an odd way, personified — warm and amazingly immediate. Perhaps it envelops me, but I do not fall asleep or lose myself in nothingness. I am myself, but very small. I seem to fade into a distance that has nothing to do with space but more to do with psychological focus. Yet I am upheld, supported and protected in the midst of this pervading energy that seems to form about and within me.

I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to see the television program, because I’ve never seen myself as Seth in trance except in a few photographs. Seth manifests through me, addressing himself to others who feel the impact of his personality, but I can’t see this as they do from the outside, objectively. To observers, Seth’s otherness from me is apparent in the way the open eyes are used, in the gestures and rearrangement of facial patterns. We simply use the body in a different way.

Seth’s presence is felt instantly, not esoterically, but in the way we perceive a magnetic personality of power and ability. Though the objective effects of this phenomenon largely escape me, I’m trying to learn all I can about the subjective aspects involved, for surely no one is in a better position to do so. Because of the emergence of Seth, I’ve become increasingly aware of many other states of consciousness besides the normal daily state that all of us know.

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, I suspect that our relationship is far more complex. One thing I know: Seth does not have his present basic existence in the three-dimensional world, and I do. He has given us instructions that allow Rob, my students and myself to take our own sometimes faltering steps out of our usual physical reality. He initiated our exploration into the universe of dreams, for example, and is therefore largely responsible for this book. But we must return to our normal daily dimension of actuality. And Seth returns to his.

Even without a physical form, Seth is highly effective in our world. Through me, he is producing the Seth Material, a continuing manuscript dealing with the nature of reality, consciousness and identity that now totals over fifty notebooks. He is also dictating his own book: Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul. To date, we have held nearly six hundred sessions. In fact, he seems to operate more efficiently in his contacts with physical reality than I do in my journeys into dimensions more naturally considered his.

My out-of-body experiences are not nearly as well directed, deliberate or effective as Seth’s behavior is here, for example. Seth dictates one final draft of his own book, while I do at least three drafts of my own. (This present book is my third since the sessions began, so Seth is hardly “stealing” any of my creative energy.)

Here I will stress subjective experience itself as it is turned toward the dreaming state in particular, and deal with Seth’s conceptions of the dream universe through excerpts from his continuing manuscript. This book will also serve as a journal of our own subjective excursions as first Rob and I, and then my students, used Seth’s ideas as maps into that strange inner landscape. We have become involved in the keenest of adventures in which ordinary obstructions do not exist while the usual suppositions of physical life do not apply.

If you have little memory of your dream locations when you are awake, then remember that you have little memory of your waking locations when you are in the dream situation. Both are legitimate and both are realities. When the body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell. But this, dear friends, has nothing to do with space, for the dream location exists simultaneously with the room in which the body sleeps.

It often seems to me that only when we close our eyes do we begin to see, literally and figuratively. This is somewhat of an exaggeration, and yet my experience, Rob’s and my students’ makes several facts clear. Our ordinary consciousness shows us only one specific view of reality. When we learn to close off our senses momentarily and change the focus of awareness, other quite valid glimpses of an interior universe begin to show themselves.

This is most obvious in dreaming, of course. Dreams may well represent us at our most creative, for not only do we process the past day’s activities, but we also choose tomorrow’s events from the limitless probable actions that are presented to us while the waking self is still.

To some extent, I do this in each Seth session — lay aside my usual consciousness. A strange letting-go that I still do not understand is necessary along with a simple but profound trust. It is, perhaps, the same sort of trust we have when we dive into the ocean — the faith that we won’t sink. (Knowing how to swim helps.)

The water analogy intrigues me, though it can’t be followed too far without leading to distortions. A scuba diver, for instance, explores what he finds on the ocean floor and brings us clues from this vast, submerged area. I try to do the same thing, salvaging instead clues from the hidden layers of our inner being. But if he goes far enough, the scuba diver must somewhere come to the bottom of the ocean, and I don’t believe there is any bottom or boundary to this inner reality. Instead, I suspect that there are even stranger chasms and openings into other worlds of whose existence we are quite unaware — pools of creativity, consciousness and experience, from which not only our three-dimensional reality but also others spring.