“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

In our case though, Rob and I usually have no direct audience (not that we can see anyhow), and those few hours spent in trance have an impact on my husband and me — and upon the world — out of context with the actual time expended.

I was between projects after The God of Jane. In the meantime I’d read over the 17 chapters of my unfinished novel, Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time, and looked over groups of notes for possible books, but nothing hit the spot. I asked for some ideas from my “natural spontaneous self,” and on August 5, 1980, I dreamed that a moving van with me in it was itself being moved by a larger vehicle ahead of some planned time. There was a squabble over seating arrangements which was finally resolved. I took that to mean that I would shortly be on the move again creatively, and to be prepared, so I had Rob help me move all my writing materials from the small breezeway where I’d finished The God of Jane, into the new patio back room, as a gesture of being ready to start over.

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

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. …

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.