“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Just then I felt an enormous sense of reassurance, good will and confidence. At a level beneath words, I knew that Seth was right: this was the time. Wholeheartedly I gave assent. I reached over for Rob’s hand. “It’s Seth,” I muttered quickly. My face must have begun to change even then, the muscles rearranging themselves into Seth’s characteristic expressions, because in that last moment I saw what seemed to be a gigantic camera lens coming in for a close-up. …

When I came out of trance, Rob was smiling, Jack and Sonja looked dazed, the camera crew were staring at me and the program was over. “Seth was great,” Rob said to me. I was overwhelmed with relief. It was over, then; Seth had come through on television. Hadn’t I alternately hoped that he would and been reluctant at the same time?

A small group surrounded us — the producer and assistant producer, Jack, Sonja and the camera men. I looked at Rob with a touch of dismay because while I’d reassured Jack that everything was quite normal, actually something was different this time: I felt as if I’d been in a plane going incredibly fast, only to be yanked suddenly to a halt. Such a tremendous amount of energy surged through me that I didn’t know what to do. For a moment it sent me reeling, and Jack caught my arm. This only embarrassed me further. I could feel my cheeks flush. I always tried to behave very sensibly to show that a trance was not a strange but a very natural phenomenon, and so my momentary stagger caught me by surprise. Rob was beside me in a moment, and I explained how I felt. A taxi was already waiting to take us to our next show, a radio program. I grabbed my bun and coffee and took them with me.

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.

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.

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.

And, as far as I know, Seth has no imprisoning body. He projects part of his consciousness, at least at times, into mine. Curious thought — I can also imagine some good-humored game of musical chairs in which I try to get out of my body, while Seth tries to get into it. While this presents a rather hilarious image, it is actually unfair. Seth doesn’t have any great interest in taking over my body for any length of time, while I have an insatiable curiosity about the experience of getting out of mine.

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.

Seth maintains that the dream universe has its own basic laws or “root assumptions” — mental equivalents to our laws of gravity, space and time. In other worlds, dream reality only seems discordant or meaningless because we judge it according to physical laws rather than by the rules that apply within it.

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.

The subconscious, in this rather ludicrous analogy, would exist between the two brains and would enable the creature to operate as a single entity. At the same time — and this is the difficult part to explain — neither of the two faces would ever ‘see’ the other’s world. They would not be aware of each other, yet each would be fully conscious.