“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

Rob and I are both convinced that the Seth Material springs from sources beyond my self, and that it is much less distorted by pat, conventionalized symbolism than are other paranormal scripts we have encountered. Seth says this material has been given by himself and others in other times and places, but that it is given again, in new ways, for each succeeding generation through the centuries. The reader will have to make his own judgments, but personally I do accept his theories as valid and significant.

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 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.

The first chapters of this book will deal with the emergence of Seth’s personality and the impact he had on our lives as we tried to understand what was happening. Out of nowhere it seemed, I found myself having experiences that I considered nearly impossible. Never in our lives had we found ourselves so caught between curiosity and caution, so fascinated and baffled.

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.