“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Following publication of my earlier book, letters came from strangers asking for help or advice. Finally I agreed to hold a few sessions for those most in need, though the responsibility frightened me. The people involved didn’t attend the sessions since they lived in other parts of the country, yet they said the advice helped them; information given concerning individual backgrounds was correct. Seth often explained problems as the result of unresolved stresses in past reincarnational lives, and gave specific advice as to how the individuals could use their abilities now to meet these challenges.

The alternative, that of hellfire, was equally unbelievable. Yet the conventional God of our fathers apparently sat without a qualm with the blessed in heaven, while the devil tortured the rest of the unlucky dead. That God, I decided, was out. I would not tolerate Him as a friend. For that matter He didn’t treat His son too well either, as the story goes. But Christ you could at least respect, I thought. He’d been here; he knew how it was.

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.