“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This class was composed of college girls. They had read my first book, knew about Seth, and had attended a few classes, but they had never witnessed a Seth session. My eyes closed. When they opened a few moments later, they were much darker. I began to speak for Seth. He had thrown my glasses to the floor in a quick characteristic gesture, yet now I scrutinized each student with sharp, clear focus. The voice that spoke was deep, quite loud, more masculine than feminine.

Seth spoke through me for over two hours, so quickly that the students had trouble taking notes. His joy and vitality were obvious. The personality was not mine. Seth’s dry, sardonic humor shone from my eyes. The muscles of my face rearranged themselves into different patterns. My normally feminine gestures were replaced by his. Seth was enjoying himself in the guise of an old man, shrewd, lively, quite human. When he spoke of the joy of existence, ringing even through such a voice as his, that deep voice boomed. Later one of the students, Carol, told me that although she knew the words were coming from my mouth, still she felt that they were coming from all over, from the walls themselves.

This was a very simple session. Seth addressed himself to the students for the first time, yet he touched upon several issues that appear often in the Seth Material: The personality is multidimensional. The individual is basically free of space and time. The fate of each of us is in our own hands. Problems not faced in this life will be faced in another. We cannot blame God, society, or our parents for misfortunes, since before this physical life we chose the circumstances into which we would be born and the challenges that could best bring about our development. We form physical matter as effortlessly and unselfconsciously as we breathe. Telepathically, we are all aware of the mass ideas from which we form our overall conception of physical reality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Seth Material has completely changed my ideas of the nature of reality, and reinforced my sense of identity. No longer do I feel as I did before, that man is the slave of time, illness, decay, and at the mercy of built-in destructive tendencies over which he has no control. I feel in control of my own destiny as never before, and no longer ruled by patterns subconsciously set during my childhood.

The first chapters of this book will deal with the emergence of Seth’s personality and the impact he had on our lives as we tried to understand what was happening. Out of nowhere it seemed, I found myself having experiences that I considered nearly impossible. Never in our lives had we found ourselves so caught between curiosity and caution, so fascinated and baffled.