“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.

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.

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 don’t “become” Seth. Instead, I seem to bask in what he is, or in his presence, if you prefer. Sometimes I am distantly aware that my facial muscles are being rearranged as they mirror Seth’s emotions rather than mine. But then, for me, the reality of the room vanishes. Though my eyes are wide open, it is Seth who looks out and smiles at Rob; Seth who speaks through my lips, discussing the nature of reality and existence from the viewpoint of someone not confined to the three-dimensional world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The water analogy intrigues me, though it can’t be followed too far without leading to distortions. A scuba diver, for instance, explores what he finds on the ocean floor and brings us clues from this vast, submerged area. I try to do the same thing, salvaging instead clues from the hidden layers of our inner being. But if he goes far enough, the scuba diver must somewhere come to the bottom of the ocean, and I don’t believe there is any bottom or boundary to this inner reality. Instead, I suspect that there are even stranger chasms and openings into other worlds of whose existence we are quite unaware — pools of creativity, consciousness and experience, from which not only our three-dimensional reality but also others spring.