“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As of December 1969, my husband, Rob, and I have held over 500 Seth sessions, over a period of five years. My first book in this field, How to Develop Your ESP Power, briefly explained the circumstances leading to my interest in ESP, and the experiments that led to my introduction to Seth. Since then, Seth has demonstrated telepathic and clairvoyant abilities on occasions too frequent to mention. Through sessions he has helped friends, strangers, and students, and by following his instructions my husband and I are learning to develop our own psychic potentials.

Yet I was not a “born psychic” with a background of paranormal experience. Neither Rob nor I had any knowledge of such matters. Even after my first enthusiasm, I didn’t accept these developments without serious self-questioning and intellectual analysis. I wanted to keep my experiences on as scientific a basis as possible.

Rob and I were hardly religious in conventional terms. We haven’t been to a church in years, except to attend weddings or funerals. I was brought up a Catholic, but as I grew older I found it more and more difficult to accept the God of my ancestors. Irony whispered that He was as dead as they were. The heaven that had sustained me as a child seemed in my teens to be a shallow mockery of meaningful existence. Who wanted to sit around singing hymns to a father-God, even if He did exist, and what sort of intelligent God would require such constant adoration? A very insecure, appallingly human kind of God indeed.

Rob’s background was different. His parents’ brand of religion was a sort of social Protestantism, rather delightfully innocent of dogma. In general, God loved little boys and girls with starched shirts, acceptable addresses, polished shoes, and fathers who made good money—it also helped if their mothers baked cookies for the PTA.

Neither of us was bitter about such a God’s apparent injustices—we didn’t pay Him that much attention. I had my poetry; Rob, who is an artist, had his painting. Each of us felt a strong sense of contact with nature. No one was more surprised than I was, then, to find myself quite abruptly speaking for someone who was supposed to have survived death. I berated myself at times, thinking that even my Irish grandmother would have found spirits in the living room rather hard to take—and I used to think she was superstitious! A surviving soul seemed part and parcel of the adults’ nonsense I’d thought I’d escaped, thanks to a college education, a quick mind, and a fine dose of native rebelliousness. It took me a while to discover that I was being as prejudiced against the idea of survival as some others were for it. Now I realize that while I was priding myself on my open-mindedness, my mental flexibility extended only to ideas that fit in with my own preconceptions. Now I know that human personality has a far greater reality than we are usually prepared to give it. Someone has produced over fifty notebooks of fascinating material, and even at my most skeptical moments I have to accept the reality of the sessions and the material. The scope, quality, and theories of the material “hooked” us almost at once.

Rob and I are both convinced that the Seth Material springs from sources beyond my self, and that it is much less distorted by pat, conventionalized symbolism than are other paranormal scripts we have encountered. Seth says this material has been given by himself and others in other times and places, but that it is given again, in new ways, for each succeeding generation through the centuries. The reader will have to make his own judgments, but personally I do accept his theories as valid and significant.

The purpose of this book is to introduce you to Seth and the Seth Material. Though Seth has appeared only once in a physical materialization, Rob has seen him clearly enough to paint a portrait of him that hangs in our living room (see the illustrated section). Through me, Seth has produced a continuing manuscript that runs well over five thousand double-spaced typewritten pages, in not quite five years’ time. I know many “living” persons who haven’t produced that much in a lifetime. Yet my own work continues: since the sessions began, I’ve written two books of nonfiction (not counting this one), two of poetry, and a dozen short stories. Seth certainly hasn’t “stolen” any of my own creative energy for his own purposes.

Excerpts from some of the early sessions will also be included in the first chapters, since Seth’s ideas were then as new and strange to us as the sessions themselves. But the main emphasis will be on the story itself, from the first Ouija board experiment through the first instance when I startled Rob and myself by speaking for Seth; and the changes in our attitudes as further developments occurred. I’ll also include examples of Seth’s clairvoyant abilities.