“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I was unhappy with the reincarnational material simply because I still didn’t want to accept the idea—it just seemed too far out. I didn’t exactly encourage Rob to ask Seth to enlarge on this information or to fill in on the details he’d given. But it was a part of the material—I could hardly deny that.

Dr. Stevenson wrote us a letter much like one I would probably write today to someone else under the same circumstances. He thought that the fluency of the material suggested a subconscious origin, but emphasized that at this stage it was impossible to tell. He also told us that amateur mediumship could produce mental symptoms under certain conditions.

“Oh, great,” I said to Rob. “Do I act any nuttier than usual?” Rob solemnly assured me that there had been no change in my behavior. Actually he had been watching for such signs, and so had I. But Dr. Stevenson’s well-meaning warning did throw me for somewhat of a loop, even though we had read the same cautions ourselves in some of our psychic books.

In a way, Dr. Stevenson’s letter came at an unfortunate time. It had been impossible to keep the sessions absolutely secret. Eventually some of our friends were bound to come around on a Monday or Wednesday evening, and hear the odd voice from outside the door as Phillip did just before we wrote Dr. Stevenson. As a result, Phil began to attend occasional sessions. I’m using the entity name that Seth gave him, since his family doesn’t understand his interest in psychic phenomena—a situation we’ve encountered more than once. Phil lives out of state but travels to Elmira every six weeks or so on business.

Just a few days before we received Dr. Stevenson’s letter, we had an unscheduled session with Phil present. We gave him paper and pen to write down any questions he might have, but Phil never got a chance to write anything down. According to him, Seth answered each of his questions in turn as Phil formed them in his mind. Phil wrote and signed a statement to this effect.

I took Phil at his word, but I also thought that coincidence could have explained the episode. Just the same, my spirits rose. Then a few days later, Dr. Stevenson’s letter came and I went into a slump. “See if Seth has anything to say about the letter,” Rob said. I agreed, but when I became tense it was difficult to relax enough to have a session. I skipped our next scheduled session as a result, but I’d recovered my equilibrium when the next Monday came.

Seth had quite a bit to say! “A fond and exasperated good evening,” he began. “The exasperation comes because your good psychologist almost undermined the confidence I managed to give Ruburt in our session with your friend, Phillip. I tried to build Ruburt’s confidence, and some stranger tore it down. His intentions were of the best, but I suppose that I must now feel obligated—and I do—to go into the matter of mental and emotional stability and any dangers to such stability that might be involved here.

“As far as Ruburt is concerned, there is no danger. For one thing I am a sensitive but disciplined and sensible—if somewhat irascible—gentleman. None of the communications from me are in any way conducive to instability. I may make bold to remark that I am more stable than you or Ruburt or the fine psychologist.

“For one thing, Ruburt’s ego is extremely strong. His intuition is the gateway that relaxes an otherwise stubborn and domineering ego.” At this, Rob looked up and laughed. “The intuitive qualities, however, are not frivolous and the personality is well integrated.” Seth went on to describe dissociation, saying that I was always aware of my surroundings to some degree in sessions. “It is true,” he said, “that a state of dissociation is necessary. But because you open a door, this does not mean that you cannot close it, nor does it mean that you cannot have two doors open at once, and this is my point. You can have two doors open at once, and you can listen to two channels at once. In the meantime you must turn down the volume of the first channel while you learn to attune your attention to the second. This process you call dissociation.”

“We have gone into this before,” Seth said, “and I have no doubt that we will on endless occasions; and if I succeed in convincing you of my reality as a separate personality, I will have done exceedingly well. It should be apparent that my communications come through Ruburt’s subconscious. But as a fish swims through water, but the fish is not the water, I am not Ruburt’s subconscious.

“The slight evidence of telepathy I gave you had a purpose. I wanted to show you that telepathy did exist, and I wanted to show Ruburt that more than his own subconscious as he knows it was involved. … Now Ruburt assembles me or allows me to assemble myself in a way that will be recognizable to you, but regardless of this, I exist in an independent manner.”

Later elaborations on the above statement gave us a pretty fair idea of what inner processes go on so that Seth and I can make contact. This involves the construction of a “psychological bridge” that will be explained later in this book. At this point I’d been speaking as Seth for about forty minutes, and he recommended a rest period, saying: “Sometime between now and twenty-five years of laying your doubts at rest, I would like to go into some other matters that I have been trying to tackle for several sessions. But take your rest, pussies.”

I used to envy Rob his viewpoint of the sessions. He could see and hear me as Seth and I couldn’t. Now during break I questioned him again. I hated to have to depend on someone else to tell me what was going on, but I had learned one thing: I couldn’t be Jane and Seth at once. For Seth to come through I had to stop such mental quibbling—at least temporarily.

“Individual life, or rather the life of any present individual, could be legitimately compared to the dream of an entity. While the individual enjoys his given number of years, these are but a flash to the entity. The entity is concerned with these years in somewhat the same manner with which you are concerned with your dreams. As you give inner purpose and organization to your dreams, and obtain insight and satisfaction from them though they involve only a part of your life, so the entity to some extent directs and gives purpose and organization to his personalities.

The session lasted until 11:30 P.M. Rob was reassured by Seth’s statements about my ability to handle dissociation, and by his responsible attitude. I was, too, but I kept thinking of the remark in Dr. Stevenson’s letter. “Of course, Seth said that everything was okay,” I said. “What else could we expect him to say?”

For a while I think I spent half the time trying to psychoanalyze Seth and the other half trying to analyze myself. Caution is one thing, but sometimes I went overboard. Even so, Seth said that my strong ego was an asset to our work when I didn’t overdo it, since it kept my whole personality on an even keel and allowed me the psychological strength to handle and develop my abilities.

One small but amusing incident came up that illustrates my attitude during those early months. We have a lovely large apartment that has, unfortunately, a tiny closet-sized kitchen. When we moved in to our present apartment, the kitchen held a stove and a small refrigerator that didn’t begin to hold all our food. We got a larger one for foods that we didn’t use every day, and this second refrigerator I put in our huge bathroom, a great old-fashioned tiled room that’s easily five times as large as the kitchen. I knew that this was a crazy place for a refrigerator, but after a while I became used to it.

In early spring Rob came down with several annoying gumboils and one night he asked Seth how he might get rid of them. Seth immediately launched into a rather hilarious discussion of the unsanitary aspects of a refrigerator in the bathroom. He made a few kindly but definite statements to the effect that we should know better, and suggested that the appliance be moved into the kitchen, where it would hold all our refrigerated food. If so, he assured Rob his gumboils would disappear.

“Do what you want,” Rob said. “I’ve got gumboils, but so what? I can live with them.”

In other words, I used to watch Seth like a hawk, particularly during the first year or so, but he always behaved intelligently, with dignity and humor. As soon as I began judging him by his actions and his effect on us, I dropped this habit. He won my trust. He has given us excellent, psychologically sound advice, but he never tried to give us orders.

Sometimes we followed his council, to our advantage. Other times we didn’t go along, for reasons of our own. In 1964 we went househunting, for example. Seth suggested we purchase a particular house. We liked it very much but it was in poor condition. Seth might very well be right, we thought—and we might be happier if we bought the house—but we just weren’t willing to take the chance.