“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It was February 29, 1968. I was holding one of my twice weekly ESP classes. The large bay window was open, letting in the unusually warm night air. The lights were normally lit in my living room where classes are held. Suddenly I felt that we had a visitor. As always I went into trance easily, without preamble.

“Change with the seasons, for you are more than the seasons. You form the seasons. They are the reflections of your inner psychic climate. I came for one purpose this evening: so that you could sense my vitality, and sensing it, know that I speak to you from dimensions beyond those with which you are acquainted. The grave is not the end, for such a noisy one as I never spoke with the lips of death.

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.

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.