“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

These differences were obvious from the first. When I’m caught up in inspiration, writing a poem, then I’m “turned on,” excited, filled with a sense of urgency, and discovery. Just before this happens, however, an idea comes out of nowhere, it seems. It is “given.” It simply appears, and from it new creative connections spring.

I’m alert, yet open and receptive — suspended in a strange psychic elasticity between poised attention and passivity. The particular poem or idea is the only thing in the world for me at that point. The highly personal involvement, the work and play involved in helping the idea “out,” all make the poem mine.

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.