“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?

“I am here to tell you that your joy is not dependent upon your youth, for I am hardly young. I am here to tell you that your joy is not dependent upon your physical body, for in your terms I have none. I have what I have always had, the identity that is mine. It is never diminished. It grows and develops.

“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.

“I come here as though I appeared through a hole in space and time. There are walks in space and time through which you can travel, and in dreams you have been where I am. I want you to feel your own vitality. Feel it travel through the universe and know that it is not dependent upon your physical image. In reality you project your own energy out to form the physical world. Therefore, to change your world, it is yourself you must change. You must change what you project.

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.

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.

I was so used to thinking of myself as a physical creature, bound to space and time, that I almost refused to accept the evidence of my own experience. While involved in the most intuitive work in the world, I tried to become more and more objective. I tried to step back into a world I had really left forever—a universe in which nothing existed except in physical terms, a world in which communications from any other realities or dimensions were impossible. Yet, we continued to have Seth sessions twice a week.

I began to have out-of-body experiences (astral projections) as I sat in the living room, speaking for Seth. Seth described what I saw while my own consciousness was miles away, perceiving locations and events in another town or state. Our files contain statements from two brothers in California, for example, asserting that Seth correctly described their home and neighborhood while I spoke for him in Elmira, New York, some three thousand miles away. I could hardly deny those facts.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The philosophical and psychological implications of mediumship and ESP phenomena and the possible origins of the Seth Material, along with several questions concerning Seth’s independent reality, will be considered. I’ll also give Seth’s advice as to the development of psychic abilities.