“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

“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.

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 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.

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.

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.