“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

My psychic initiation really began one evening in September, 1963, however, as I sat writing poetry. Suddenly my consciousness left my body, and my mind was barraged by ideas that were astonishing and new to me at the time. On return to my body, I discovered that my hands had produced an automatic script, explaining many of the concepts that I’d been given. The notes were even titled — The Physical Universe as Idea Construction.

The messages seemed to begin where Idea Construction left off, and later Seth said that my expansion of consciousness experience had represented his first attempt at contact. Since then, Seth has delivered a continuing manuscript that now totals over six thousand typewritten pages. We call it the Seth material, and it deals with such topics as the nature of physical matter, time, and reality, the god concept, probable universes, health, and reincarnation. From the beginning, the obvious quality of the material intrigued us, and it was for this reason that we continued.

The next chapter will deal with the basic methods of communication that are used by any consciousness, according to its degree, whether or not it is physical. This will lead up to the basic communication used by human personalities as you understand them, and point out these inner communications as existing independently of the physical senses, which are merely physical extensions of inner perception.

The next chapter will relate what experience I have had in all my existences with those “pyramid gestalts” of which I speak in the material, and about my own relationship with the personality you call Seth Two, and with multidimensional consciousnesses far more evolved than I.

Out of curiosity, I looked over a few of the early chapters of Seth’s book, then stayed away from it. Occasionally Rob told me about a few passages that he thought my students might be particularly interested in. Otherwise I paid no attention to the book, being content to let Seth do it. Generally speaking, I put his work out of my mind, and didn’t even see the manuscript for months at a time.

Because of my own writing experience, I’m also well aware of the process involved in translating unconscious material into conscious reality. It’s particularly obvious when I’m working on poetry. Whatever else is involved in Seth’s book, certainly some kind of unconscious activity is operating at high gear. It was only natural, then, that I found myself comparing my own conscious creative experience with the trance procedure involved in Seth’s book. I wanted to discover why I felt that Seth’s book was his, as divorced from mine. If both were coming from the same unconscious, then why the subjective differences in my feelings?

I’ve found that only my own writing gives me the particular kind of creative satisfaction that I need, however — the conscious involvement with unconscious material, the “excitement of the chase.” Because Seth does his thing, I am not absolved from doing mine. I would feel deprived if I did not continue with my own work.

Anyone can say, of course, that in Seth’s book the hidden processes are so separate from my normal consciousness that the final product only seems to come from another personality. I can only state my own feelings and emphasize that Seth’s book, and the whole six-thousand-page manuscript of Seth material, don’t take care of my own creative expression or responsibility. If both came from the same unconscious, it seems that there would be no slack to take up.

Despite this, I’m aware of the fact that I was necessary to the production of Seth’s book. He needs my ability with words; even, I think, my turn of mind. Certainly my writing training aids in the translation of his material and helps give it form, no matter how unconsciously this is done. Certain personality characteristics are important too, I imagine — the agility with which I can switch the focus of my consciousness, for example.

Looked at merely as an example of unconscious production, however, Seth’s book clearly shows that organization, discrimination, and reasoning are certainly not qualities of the conscious mind alone, and demonstrates the range and activity of which the inner self is capable. I do not believe that I could get the equivalent of Seth’s book on my own. The best I could do would be to hit certain high points, perhaps in isolated poems or essays, and they would lack the overall unity, continuity, and organization that Seth has here provided automatically.

Besides this, I have certain unique experiences during sessions that seem to compensate for my lack of conscious creative involvement. Often I participate in Seth’s great energy and humor, for example, enjoying a sense of emotional richness and encountering Seth’s personality on a very strange level. I feel his mood and vitality clearly, though they are not directed at me, but to whomever Seth is addressing at the moment. I feel them as they pass through me.

This book is Seth’s way of demonstrating that human personality is multidimensional, that we exist in many realities at once, that the soul or inner self is not something apart from us, but the very medium in which we exist. He emphasizes that “truth” is not found by going from teacher to teacher, church to church, or discipline to discipline, but by looking within the self. The intimate knowledge of consciousness, the “secrets of the universe,” are not esoteric truths to be hidden from the people, then. Such information is as natural to man as air, and as available to those who honestly seek it by looking to the source within.

In my opinion, Seth has written a book that is a classic of its kind. After referring to him cautiously as “a personality,” I feel bound to add that Seth is an astute philosopher and psychologist, deeply knowledgeable in the ways of human personality, and well aware of the triumph and plight of human consciousness.

I’m personally intrigued, of course, that this book was written through me, without my conscious mind there at every point, anxiously checking, organizing, and criticizing, as it does in my own work. Then, while my creative and intuitional abilities are given a good deal of freedom, the conscious mind is definitely in control. Yet this book was not written “by itself,” in the same way that some poems seem to be. Often a writer will say that a certain book “wrote itself,” and I know what that means. In this case, however, the book came from a specific source, not just from “out there,” and it is colored by the author’s personality, which is not mine.

Seth also appears frequently in the dreams of my students, giving them instructions that work — either involving methods of using their abilities or of achieving certain goals. Almost all of my students have frequent “class dreams,” also, in which Seth addresses them as a group and initiates dream experiments. Sometimes they see him as he appears in the portrait Rob painted of him. On occasion he speaks through my image, as in normal sessions. I have awakened many times, when such dream sessions were taking place, hearing Seth’s words still lingering in my mind.

It’s not unusual that students should dream of Seth, of course, or that they should dream of me. But certainly Seth has achieved independent status in their eyes and has become a vehicle of instruction even in the dream state. In other words, besides producing the continuing Seth material and this book, Seth has entered the minds and consciousness of many people.

First of all, to me the term “unconscious” is a poor one, barely hinting at an actual open psychic system, with deep intertwining roots uniting all kinds of consciousness; a network in which we are all connected. Our individuality rises out of it, but also helps form it. This source contains past, present, and future information; only the ego experiencing time as we know it. I also believe that this open system contains other kinds of consciousness beside our own.

Because of my own experiences, particularly with out-of-body states, I’m convinced that consciousness is not dependent upon physical matter. Certainly physical expression is my main mode of existence right now, but I don’t take this to infer that all consciousness must be so oriented. Only the most blind egotism, it seems to me, would dare define reality in its own terms or project its own limitations and experience upon the rest of existence.

I accept Seth’s idea of multidimensional personality as described in this book because my experiences, and those of my students seem to confirm it. I also think that in that open system of consciousness and unlimited source, there is an independent Seth who operates in quite different terms than we do.

“Perhaps what we are has always waited, hidden in the possibilities of creation, dispersed and unknowing — in the rain and wind that swept across Europe in the thirteenth century — in the heaving mountain ranges — in the clouds that rushed through the skies of other times and places. As dust particles, we may have blown past Greek doorways. We may have been sparked on and off into consciousness and unconsciousness a million times, touched by desire, by yearnings toward creativity and perfection we barely understood.

“And so there may be others now (like Seth), also without images, but knowing — others who have been what we are and more — others who remember what we have forgotten. They may have discovered through some acceleration of consciousness other forms of being, or dimensions of reality of which we are also part.

“Seth may be leading us out of our usual limitations, into another realm that is ours by right — elemental whether we are in flesh or out of it. He may be the voice of our combined selves, saying, ‘While you are conscious bodies, remember what it was like and will be like to be bodiless, to be freewheeling energy without a name but with a voice that does not need tongue, with a creativity that does not need flesh. We are yourselves, turned inside out.’”