“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

During the interview Jack asked me if Seth would come through. I replied that it was up to Seth. Actually, since I hadn’t gone into trance on any other programs, I doubted I would now. Instead, Jack began to play a taped Seth session. As I heard those deep resonant tones of his, I knew that Seth was present.

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.

What actually happened while I was in trance? Jack and Sonja described some of the session to me in our brief conversation afterward, and Rob filled me in as we rushed to the next program.

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.

I have been speaking for Seth in twice-weekly sessions since late 1963. At the very least, this has given me personal experience with altered states of consciousness and glimpses into subjective areas largely unexplored. Certainly, it was because of Seth that I found myself studying the dream reality that comes into focus while the body sleeps.

The relationship between Seth and myself snaps into focus by prearranged appointments, as suggested by him in the early day’s of the sessions. Each Monday and Wednesday at 9:00 P.M., I sit in my favorite rocker. Rob sits across from me on the couch with his note pad and pen, ready to take notes. Normal lights are lit. I may feel very unpsychic, or even cross. I may feel tired, or really want to go dancing. Yet at nine, the session begins, and Seth “comes alive.”

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.)

In The Seth Material, I told the story of my psychic initiation and introduction to Seth as I understood it at that time, and gave a sampling of his ideas on a wide variety of subjects. I also emphasized the “evidential” material we had received — spontaneous clairvoyant demonstrations given in sessions and in the envelope tests that we conducted for over a year. Seth has given correct clairvoyant descriptions of people and events in other parts of this country and Puerto Rico.

In the 28th Session, he used an analogy to explain this dual conscious focus:

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.

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.)