“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For a moment I was appalled. All kinds of doubts filled my mind. I hadn’t held a regular Seth session since the tour. Suppose the lights bothered me or the trance wasn’t deep enough? I had a horror, too, of putting on any kind of display. Regular Seth sessions in the privacy of our living room were one thing. Going into trance on television was something else again. “Oh, Seth,” I said mentally, in consternation.

First of all, as always, my face changed expression drastically, and I began to speak in a deep male-like voice. My own characteristic gestures vanished, to be replaced by Seth’s. He turned toward the camera, speaking directly to the viewers for perhaps ten minutes. By then, Sonja and Jack recovered from their surprise, and Jack asked Seth if he would speak about reincarnation.

Above all, it deepened my trust in Seth and in his psychological insight and impressed me once again with the remarkable abilities of the inner intuitive self, for it is this part of me that makes communication with Seth possible. For another thing, because of the program format the trance was cut short, and this gave me the opportunity to study the trance phenomenon from a different angle.

Usually a session runs for several hours, and the energy is used up by the time the session is over. On the show, the session lasted only twenty minutes or a half hour, at most. When it was cut short, all that energy was still available, and subjectively I was aware of its full strength for the first time.

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.

While I’m writing this book in the three-dimensional world, for example, the source material for it comes from the other side of consciousness — that dimension that is revealed to us in dreams, inspiration, trance states and creativity. This book is about Seth, dreams and “astral projection” — all aspects of a different kind of consciousness than the objective one with which we are usually occupied.

For this reason alone, I would like to believe that his abilities were mine, that in the trance state, my own latent talents were operating without obstruction, freed from the normal hang-ups and distractions that annoy us all and hamper our development. I would like to think that for a few short hours a week, at least, I was operating at optimum capacity — that Seth’s energy and knowledge were really mine. Lovely thought, and possibly true to some extent.

Actually, this is a simple analogy and only carries us so far, but in the beginning Seth used it as a way of giving us some idea of man’s current (and artificial) relationship to dream reality. Later, by following the material and Seth’s instructions, we discovered that we could dissolve these barriers to some extent. We have been able to prove, to ourselves at least, that dream events are quite real. Flying dreams are not all disguised sexual fantasies, as Freud maintained, for example. In many of them we are flying, and the destinations we reach are quite physical. Our records show clearly that what we saw in some such episodes were not imaginary places, but locations we visited while the body slept. Some are described in this book.

Today I received scientific corroboration by mail from James Beal, a NASA scientist, for some of Seth’s data on the units that Seth says underlie all physical particles. This information, given to us in sessions, was published in the appendix of The Seth Material. The paper Jim sent was so professionally oriented that I could hardly understand it, couched as it was in specialized mathematical language. Yet through Seth, we had received the same data. Someone — my own unconscious or Seth — had access to it; that much is certain. The creative consciousness was at work far “beneath” the consciousness I call my own.

We all have access to this creative consciousness, particularly in dreams and dissociated states when we are not so obsessed with physical sense data. Often, evidence of it emerges into consciousness in the guise of sudden hunches or creative inspiration.