“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The television camera lights were warm on my face. My husband, Rob, and I sat with Sonja Carlson and Jack Cole, who were interviewing us on the Boston “Today’s Woman Show” on television station WBZ. It was 10 A.M. on the last day of our first tour to promote my book, The Seth Material. This was our fifth television show. I tried to look composed and confident, though I still found it difficult to face strangers so early in the day, much less the world at large — particularly when I was expected to explain my own psychic experiences and the philosophical concepts of The Seth Material.

As he began the interview, Jack Cole told the unseen audience that I was a medium who spoke for a personality called Seth. He emphasized that my presence on the show didn’t necessarily mean that he or Sonja accepted Seth’s independent existence. I smiled, somewhat ruefully. Many people feel duty-bound to express skepticism as if it were an automatic badge of honor and intellectual superiority. I’d done the same thing in the past, so I could understand the attitude.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Above all, it deepened my trust in Seth and in his psychological insight and impressed me once again with the remarkable abilities of the inner intuitive self, for it is this part of me that makes communication with Seth possible. For another thing, because of the program format the trance was cut short, and this gave me the opportunity to study the trance phenomenon from a different angle.

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 was disappointed that I wasn’t able to see the television program, because I’ve never seen myself as Seth in trance except in a few photographs. Seth manifests through me, addressing himself to others who feel the impact of his personality, but I can’t see this as they do from the outside, objectively. To observers, Seth’s otherness from me is apparent in the way the open eyes are used, in the gestures and rearrangement of facial patterns. We simply use the body in a different way.

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.

Following Seth’s instructions, my husband and I first learned to recall and record our dreams. Through later experiments, we discovered that we could bring our normal waking consciousness into the dream state and “come awake” while dreaming. Later we began to take bolder steps into these inner areas, learning to manipulate consciousness in what was for us an entirely new way.

For this reason alone, I would like to believe that his abilities were mine, that in the trance state, my own latent talents were operating without obstruction, freed from the normal hang-ups and distractions that annoy us all and hamper our development. I would like to think that for a few short hours a week, at least, I was operating at optimum capacity — that Seth’s energy and knowledge were really mine. Lovely thought, and possibly true to some extent.

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.