“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.

“I am in this room, although there is no object within which you can place me. You are as disembodied as I. You have a vehicle to use, a body that you call your own, and that is all. I borrow Ruburt’s [Seth’s name for me; in addition, Seth always speaks of me as male] with his consent, but what I am is not dependent upon atoms and molecules and what you are is not dependent upon physical matter. You have lived before and will live again, and when you are done with physical existence, you will still live.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Before I was twenty, then, I’d left behind me that archaic God, the Virgin, and the communion of saints. Heaven and hell, angels and devils, were dismissed. This particular group of chemicals and atoms I called “me” would fall into no such traps—at least none that I could recognize.

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.