“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Moreover, the riddle of such personalities as Seth—call it “spirit possession,” a “daemon” (as Socrates did)—has concerned mankind through the ages. The phenomenon is hardly new. Through telling my own story and presenting the material, I hope to throw some light upon the nature of such experiences and to show that human personality has abilities still to be tapped, and other ways to receive knowledge than those it usually employs.

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 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.