“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Precisely because I am acquainted with the effort involved in writing a book, I was cautious when Seth spoke of writing his own. Though I knew perfectly well that he could do it, a nagging part of me questioned. “Granted, the Seth material is really significant, but what does Seth know about writing books? About the organization required? Or about directing himself to the public?”

Reading the finished book was a delightful experience. As a whole it was completely new to me, though each word had been spoken through my lips, and I had devoted many evenings in trance to its production. This was particularly strange to me since I am a writer myself, used to organizing my own material, keeping track of it, and hovering over it like a mother hen.

Seth intimates as much in Chapter Four, when he says, “Now the information in this book is being directed to some extent through the inner senses of the woman who is in trance as I write it. Such endeavor is the result of highly organized inner precision, and of training. [She] could not receive the information from me — it could not be translated nor interpreted — while she was focused intensely in the physical environment.”

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.

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.

“We come together in ways that we do not understand. We’re composed of elements, chemicals, and atoms, and yet we speak and call ourselves by name. We organize about our inner stuff the outer stuff that coagulates into flesh and bone. Our identities or personalities spring from sources we do not know.