“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Immediately Seth launched into a discussion of Sonja’s past life experiences. In the time available, he dwelt on one life in particular, during which he said Sonja had a cleft palate that impeded verbal communication. According to Seth, this partially accounted for her interest in the field of communications now. He also said that Sonja loved color and fabric and that she used these as a method of communication in the past life as well as in this one. Some names and places in fourteenth-century England were given, and these are being checked out.

A few day’s later, I received a long distance call at home from a woman who told me that Seth’s appearance on the “Today’s Woman Show” convinced her of life after death, though she had never believed in it before. She also said that listening to Seth had been the most profound religious experience of her life, although Seth had not talked in specific religious terms. Since then, we have received many calls, letters and visits from people who saw that show. They were astonished by the program, yet in a strange way, so was I. It taught me several things.

You could say, if you wanted to, that Seth intruded himself from some unconscious dimension into my conscious life, yet now he is such a part of my professional and personal experience that much of my time is spent studying and interpreting his theories. His appearance on television seems to represent a further step in his “objectification,” which is to me, an astonishing one.

Certainly my life has been vastly enriched by an odd subjective mobility. I write this book during the day in my study, looking out the wide bay windows at the street and at the mountains and river just beyond. But when I want new material for a particular chapter, I turn the focus of my attention from the exterior world to the interior one. Then my physical environment does not concern me, and my normal waking life is the dream.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that in dream life I’m writing a book about waking consciousness just as, with my waking consciousness, I’m writing about the reality of dreams. It wouldn’t astonish me either to learn that Seth in an entirely different dimension speaks for a personality called Jane. In fact, I sometimes amuse myself by imagining a situation in which Seth wonders if Jane is a secondary personality with an obsessive belief in some improbable physical reality. Seth, however, is far more knowledgeable than I am, so if he were speaking for me, then I’m afraid he would get the lesser end of the bargain.

On Tuesday nights I hold an ESP class, and often Seth addresses the students, explaining his ideas in terms of every-day life, relating them to personal conduct. Often he speaks to individual students, encouraging them to use their own abilities and solve their own problems. His psychological understanding is excellent. He seems to be a personality enjoying the full richness of experience and potential.

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.

In other words, while most books are written about events that occur in waking reality, this one will be mainly concerned with events that happen precisely when consciousness is turned away from normal objective life. Much more is involved than even the nature of the dream state and man’s fascinating ability to withdraw consciousness from the body. These phenomena are only evidences of the greater creative consciousness that is inherent and active in each of us — the interior universe of which we know so little.