“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.

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.

People have often asked me how I know when Seth is present, and I have had some difficulty in answering. Examining my feelings after the program and finding myself face to face with that energy, I realized that the same sort of energy, to a lesser degree, is one of my main cues that Seth is ready to come through.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Many of Seth’s concepts, on probabilities or on, say, the nature of radio stars, cannot be checked out except by specialists. Most of the data on dreams, however, can be proven by anyone with enough curiosity, determination and sense of adventure to follow the guidelines that The Seth Material provides. In one of his early statements on dreams, Seth said:

There is, of course, an apparent contradiction here, but it is only apparent, your dilemma being this: If you have another self-conscious self, then why aren’t you aware of it? Pretend that you are some weird creature with two faces. One face looks out upon one world [the dream reality] and one face looks out upon another world [the physical one].

Imagine further this poor creature having a brain to go with each face, and each brain interprets reality in terms of the world it looks upon. Yet the two worlds are different, and more, the creatures are Siamese twins. At the same time, imagine that these two creatures are really one, but with definite parts equipped to handle two entirely different worlds.

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.

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.