“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As Seth I’ve produced five previous books: Seth Speaks; The Nature of Personal Reality; The “Unknown” Reality, Volumes I and II; The Nature of the Psyche; and The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, and Seth is halfway through a sixth book: Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment. These beside my own twelve books. Seth doesn’t answer mail though, or do any typing, and so as a result of those trance hours Rob and I spend a good deal of our conscious energy dealing one way or another with the effects of that trance life.

So on August 6th I sat in the patio-room with fresh paper, fresh typewriter cartridge, and hopefully fresh mind, looking over my interpretations of Rob’s latest dreams. It was a very hot August afternoon. The pieces of the world fell neatly into their proper places. The pictures of the moments clicked together as they usually do, each instant precise, yet leading into another. The motion seemed to be all exterior, from the too-warm wind that blew into my small studio from the back hill, to the shadows of moving foliage outside that flickered across the floor.

As I recognized the feeling of inspiration, I glanced idly toward the kitchen. The sight of the table struck my fancy, plus my view of the front doorway, with the green foliage showing through the open threshold. I thought about doing another painting of the scene; I hadn’t done any painting in months. Then I thought of asking Rob to take a snapshot of the table area, so that I could paint it later. Not two minutes passed before Rob stood at my door with his camera! He’d bought a flash gadget several months ago to use with it, and he hadn’t tried it out yet. Now he told me he had one exposure left, and he wanted to take a snapshot of me to use it up.

My feelings “clicked;” the incident was significant; and it seemed to fit in too perfectly and meaningfully into the events just previous, as if saying “yes, you do operate magically” … and this is an example of how those perceptions work. If Rob hadn’t come in at that point, I wouldn’t have known that my thought about cameras had anything to do with his thoughts or activities at the same time. So how often do our thoughts relate in one way or another to the thoughts of others?³

Rob’s notes helped me realize that all of this wasn’t as alien as it usually seems. The magical orientation might be in direct conflict with our training in this and most present cultures. But it would be part of our natural way of looking at the world — a way that has been overlaid by our belief in the “rational” way of doing things. That way was proving to be not so rational at all, incidently. But I thought there would be things in each person’s life that could be used as guideposts, to a magical kind of orientation. …

1. Jane Roberts writes in The God of Jane: “Since late 1963, I’ve clocked approximately 4,000 hours of trancetime, during which the Seth sessions have been held twice weekly. … My trancetime is more concentrated than regular time. I’m not unconscious but conscious in a different way, at another level … This state of perception has nothing to do with classical pathological dissociation; and its products — Seth’s five books — display a highly-developed intellect at work and give evidence of a special kind of creativity. In those trance hours I ‘turn into someone else.’ At least I am not myself to myself; I become Seth, or a part of what Seth is. I don’t feel ‘possessed’ or ‘invaded’ during sessions. I don’t feel that some superspirit has ‘taken over’ my body. Instead it’s as if I’m practicing some precise psychological art, one that is ancient and poorly understood in our culture; or as if I’m learning a psychological science that helps me map the contours of consciousness itself … after all this time, I’m finally examining the trance view of reality and comparing it to the official views of science and religion. …

Jane had been speaking for Seth for six years when she posed for me. I don’t regard my unsigned effort as being a finished work. It was just the best I could do at the time.