“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Because of that experience, I began doing research into psychic activity, and planned a book on the project. In line with this, my husband, Rob, and I experimented with a Ouija board late in 1963. After the first few sessions, the pointer spelled out messages that claimed to come from a personality called Seth.

Neither Rob or I had any psychic background, and when I began to anticipate the board’s replies, I took it for granted that they were coming from my subconscious. Not long after, however, I felt impelled to say the words aloud, and within a month I was speaking for Seth while in a trance state.

Rob has always taken verbatim notes of the Seth sessions, using his own shorthand system. Later in the week he types them and adds them to our collection of Seth material. Rob’s excellent notes point up the living framework in which the sessions take place. His support and encouragement have been invaluable.

To our way of thinking, we have kept over six hundred appointments with the universe — though Rob would never describe it that way himself. These appointments are kept in our well-lighted, large living room, but in deeper terms they take place within the spaceless area of human personality.

Here is a copy of that outline, which was given to us in Session 510, January 19, 1970. As you’ll see here, Seth calls me Ruburt, and Rob, Joseph. These names represent our entire personalities as distinguished from our present physically oriented selves.

(By now [Rob wrote in his notes] Jane’s pace had slowed considerably, and her eyes were often closed. She took many pauses, some of them long.)

Rob kept telling me not to worry about it. Friends and students seemed astonished that of all people, I should have any doubts, but I thought — of all people, who else should have doubts? Here was a stated intent. Could Seth follow through?

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.

As Rob’s notes show, I often have other kinds of experiences, also, while speaking for Seth. Sometimes, for instance, I see inner visions. These may illustrate what Seth is saying, so that I am receiving information in two ways, or they may be completely separate from the script. I’ve had several “out-of-body” experiences also during sessions, when I saw events actually happening some thousands of miles away.

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.

Rob and I don’t refer to Seth as a spirit; we dislike the connotations of the term. Actually what we object to is the conventional idea of a spirit, which is an extension of quite limited ideas of human personality, only projected more or less intact into an afterlife. You can say that Seth is a dramatization of the unconscious or an independent personality. Personally, I don’t see why the statements have to be contradictory. Seth may be a dramatization playing a very real role — explaining his greater reality in the only terms we can understand. This is my opinion at this time.

In what terms? Quite honestly, I don’t know. The closest I’ve come to explaining my own views was in a short intuitive statement I wrote for my ESP class, as I tried to clear my ideas for myself and my students as well. Rob had told me about the “Speakers”, as Seth calls them in this book — personalities who continually speak to man through the ages, reminding him of inner knowledge so that it is never really forgotten. This evocative idea inspired me to write the small piece which I am including here. It points up the framework in which I think Seth and others like him may exist.

Proofreading involved work on Rob’s notes mainly, as he made them more presentable. In some cases, material not a part of the book was included if it seemed relevant, cast sidelights on the method of presentation, or gave insights into Seth himself. As Rob’s notes also show, Seth began dictating the Appendix as soon as the book was finished. Rather amusingly, I didn’t realize that Seth had already begun the Appendix, and I spent several days wondering just who was supposed to take care of it — and if Seth was, when he would begin.