“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“According to what you have been taught, you are composed of physical matter and cannot escape it, and this is not so. The physical matter will disintegrate, but you will not. Though you cannot find me, know that I am here. Your own parents seem to disappear before your eyes and vanish into nothingness forever. I can assure you that they will continue to live. I can assure you that death is another beginning, and that when you are dead, you are not silenced. For is this voice that you hear now, silence? Is this presence that you sense within this room, death?

“You are what you are, and you will be more. Do not be afraid of change, for you are change, and you change as you sit before me. All action is change, for otherwise there would be a static universe, and then indeed death would be the end. What I am is also what you are: individualized consciousness.

“Change with the seasons, for you are more than the seasons. You form the seasons. They are the reflections of your inner psychic climate. I came for one purpose this evening: so that you could sense my vitality, and sensing it, know that I speak to you from dimensions beyond those with which you are acquainted. The grave is not the end, for such a noisy one as I never spoke with the lips of death.

“Yes,” I said in effect. “I do speak in trance for a personality who claims to have survived death. Yes, you can develop your own extrasensory abilities. Yes, Seth does insist that reincarnation is a fact. But … but … but.” I found the ideas presented in the Seth Material fascinating, but I was not about to accept them as the same kind of solid fact with which I accepted, say, the bacon I eat for breakfast. Now I know they are far more important.

To me it was tantamount to intellectual suicide to even admit the possibility that Seth actually was a personality who had survived death. Nowhere in my first book did I say that I thought Seth was exactly what he said he was: “an energy personality essence no longer focused in physical reality.” Instead I studied the various explanations for such personalities given by psychologists and parapsychologists on the one hand, and by spiritualists on the other. Nowhere did I find an explanation as logical and consistent as that given in the Seth Material itself.

Before this I had suspected that the reincarnational data was a delightful dish of fantasy cooked up by my own subconscious. When all this began, in fact, I wasn’t at all sure that we survived death once, much less over and over again.

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.

I don’t mean to imply that I feel myself entirely released from every worry and fear, only that I now know we do have the freedom to change ourselves and our environment, and that in a very basic manner, we ourselves form the environment to which we then react. I believe that we form our own reality—now, and after death.

The bulk of the book will deal with Seth’s ideas on various subjects, such as life after death, reincarnation, health, the nature of physical reality, the God concept, dreams, time, identity, and perception. I’m sure that these excerpts from the material itself and some sample reincarnational readings will give most readers greater insights into their own personalities and the situations in which they find themselves. I hope that Seth’s theories on health will benefit all my readers, and that the material on personality will help each discover for himself the multidimensional reality that is his heritage.