“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

All during this time I was working at the local art gallery in the afternoons. Mornings I spent on my ESP book, writing up the results of our experiments. We still hadn’t told anyone what we were doing, except our friend, Bill. In fact few of our friends even knew what we were up to until the book was out. Now I wonder why we were so secretive, but at the time it seemed much better to keep the world with all of its questions out. We had enough of our own to consider.

“Everything on your plane is the materialization of something that exists independently of your plane. Therefore, within your senses there are other senses that perceive inward. Your regular senses perceive an outer world. The senses within the recognizable senses perceive and create an inner world … once you exist on a particular plane you must necessarily be attuned to it while blocking out many other perceptions. It is a sort of psychic focus, a concentration of awareness along certain lines. As your ability grows in relation to the environment then you can afford to look around, use the Inner Senses, and enlarge your scope of activity. This is only natural. Survival on a particular plane depends upon your concentration within it. When survival is more or less satisfied through attention, then you can afford to perceive other realities.”

The impression Rob got from the voice, gestures, and manner was that of an energetic, educated gentleman of the “old school,” in his sixties perhaps, extraordinarily intelligent but aware of his own foibles—a man with a highly developed yet old-fashioned sense of humor. As Seth I touched a begonia plant (one of my favorites) and said, “I like Jane’s plant. Green things are a touchstone of your existence. You notice that earlier I used the term ‘plane’ rather than ‘planet,’ because you do not have the whole kettle to yourself. …

Seth went on until past midnight. The remark about the change in my features was included in the notes, of course, but it was otherwise forgotten until a year later when it was brought rather forcibly to mind. When the session was over, my own voice was still fresh and clear, with no trace of the earlier difficulties. I wasn’t even tired.

Again, on reading the notes we were fascinated by the material, particularly since Seth told us that he was going to explain these Inner Senses more fully, and teach us how to use them. He was as good as his word, for as you will see shortly, he did give us instructions and we were to have all kinds of new experiences as we followed them. We didn’t know that this information was geared to our own level of understanding and quite simple in comparison with the elaborations that would follow.

We didn’t realize either that the emergence of the Seth voice completed the psychic structure through which we would receive the Seth Material, and through which Seth’s personality would express itself. From this session on, there was always some voice change during sessions, but the deep booming tones were the exception rather than the rule for some time to come. On occasion there is the sense of really tremendous power behind the voice; and my own voice is never strained. Much later, Seth told us that this psychic energy can be translated into sound like this, or it can be used for other purposes. Now when Seth gives clairvoyant material, for example, the voice is seldom loud. The energy is used to gather the data instead. (As you will see later in this book, that energy can also be a springboard into other dimensions.)

Talk about psychic explosions! Our first Ouija board session had been on December 2, 1963. By the end of January we had twenty sessions and some 230 pages of typewritten material. We knew that the voice change was significant, of course, but we didn’t realize that the power behind the voice was the more important issue. We saw that the sessions had a kind of order, but its significance escaped us. Actually, the structure provided continuity and stability, but also was flexible enough to nurture latent developments of which we were then completely unaware. Within it my own training as a medium would take place safely.

As a result of Seth’s instructions, both of us began to have some clairvoyant experiences on our own, and we thought we should write to someone who knew more about such matters than we did. Besides, there was that pressing question: Was Seth part of my subconscious? Could the psychologists tell us? So we decided to contact a parapsychologist who would have a knowledge of ESP and psychology.