“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.

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:

“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?

“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.

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.

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.

I don’t mean to imply that I feel myself entirely released from every worry and fear, only that I now know we do have the freedom to change ourselves and our environment, and that in a very basic manner, we ourselves form the environment to which we then react. I believe that we form our own reality—now, and after death.