“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.

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.

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?

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. …