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A DAY IN WHICH MAGIC COMES TO LIFE AND SETH DESCRIBES WHAT “THE MAGICAL APPROACH” TO LIFE IS

Twice a week when evening comes (as most of my readers know) while our neighbors go to movies, or shopping plazas, or just have friends in to watch television, I go into a trance,¹ “become” Seth, and take on a kind of a second life, or a life within a life. Actually, the sessions usually last anywhere from one to three hours, so I suppose that many people spend a good deal more time than that playing golf or tennis.

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.

In the summer of 1980 I missed Seth sessions for nearly two months. I was finishing work on one of my own books, The God of Jane. Rob was preparing Seth’s The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events for publication. We were both caught up in the same events as most other people were during that June and July — the hotter-than-usual nights and days, the drought in parts of New York State that touched our area lightly, the TV news drama as the political parties argued and planned for their conventions. Some nights the (singing) bugs in the small back woods were louder than the sound of our television set. The same heat that made me groan with dismay turned Rob into some version of a south-sea island native. He looked supercool in his cut-off denim shorts; his long hair curled into natural corkscrews, his light durable frame seeming to luxuriate in the heat while my light durable frame turned into a sponge that added ten pounds of fatigue.

Suddenly I had a whole bunch of thoughts that I wanted to write up regarding this … “magical orientation” Rob was speaking of. Seth’s “Framework 2” would be this magical area, of course, I thought. Yet except for the beginning of that (part) of Seth’s material, Framework 2⁴ never really got through to me emotionally. Somehow Rob’s few notes did, or maybe I was just ready. The magical orientation to reality would include intellectual activity. That went without saying, but the way of relating to life would be completely different too; the way of dealing with problems or health difficulties; of achieving goals and so forth would be drastically different. The word “action” would mean something else than it does, too.

As I wrote the fan whirred, stirring the air against my skin as the green leaves winked — and I felt a trance at last entering the neighborhood of my mind. Seth, I knew, would start up the sessions again that night — if I wanted to. …⁵

I grinned. I wanted to. Yet after the two-month layoff I was nervous too; as I always was after any extended “trance vacation.” Suppose — just suppose — I couldn’t start up again or I lost the knack as suddenly as I’d acquired it (17 years before)? Or Seth spoke gibberish? I didn’t really worry that such things might happen, but I was uneasily aware that they could. “Nonsense,” I muttered, “it’s the heat!” Because I knew that Seth would speak about the magical “connection.” I managed another grin — and who should know more about “magic” than Seth? Didn’t he emerge magically to begin with?

Around 4:00 the temperature hit 92 degrees and I thought of putting the session off. Rob and I took an hour’s nap, though, and ate supper at the coffee table while watching the evening news. I wiggled around a lot trying to get comfortable while the “cool as a cucumber” Rob said what a great day it was. And finally, just after 8:30 I began to feel Seth around.

It was okay. After the layoff, there was Seth poised psychologically once again (for over the thousandth time). At the threshold of my mind those “psychic gears” turned. Rob was ready with his notebook and pen. I took a sip of my wine and ice. The fan whirred. A slightly cool breeze came in through the open doors and windows. Then I took off my glasses, “turned into” Seth, and began to speak. Bare legs propped up on the coffee table Rob sat, pen poised, and the session started.

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. …

3. See Appendix A for Jane’s material on how some of her own thoughts “relate in one way or another to the thoughts of others.” Included also are excerpts from Seth’s material on a different prediction experience of Jane’s.

4. In Note 2 for Session One, I quote myself and Seth on Frameworks 1 and 2.

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.