“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We were having a spontaneous Seth session. It served to introduce the students to Seth, and I will let a few excerpts from it serve the same purpose now, introducing Seth to those readers who have not heard of him:

I began to have out-of-body experiences (astral projections) as I sat in the living room, speaking for Seth. Seth described what I saw while my own consciousness was miles away, perceiving locations and events in another town or state. Our files contain statements from two brothers in California, for example, asserting that Seth correctly described their home and neighborhood while I spoke for him in Elmira, New York, some three thousand miles away. I could hardly deny those facts.

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.

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.