“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s tricky to play hopscotch back and forth between various stages of consciousness, to travel into little-understood subjective realms, explore those inner landscapes and return with any clear clues as to their nature. Such explorations are highly important, however, because they bring us in touch with that basic inner reality that underlies our individual conscious thought and existence and which is the bedrock of our civilization.