“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“But the idea of self-betrayal can lead to distortions.”

I had no idea how to tell Rob that I was out of my body, as Seth was carrying on as usual. My body, I knew, would be animated, as Seth talked. Once I laughed to myself and thought: “I’ll have to send him a telegram.” In the meantime I floated in the air, quite high, looking down on the location Seth was describing. I was able to move about, changing my position to get a better view. But I had no connection at all with the body that sat in the living room. Seth was saying:

All of this was highly interesting to Phil, who had no idea where the woman lived, and knew nothing about her except her name and probable age. Since he was to be in town the next day, Phil went back to the bar and started asking questions. He found out the woman’s address from the bartender and drove down the street to discover that Seth knew what he was talking about. She lived in the third house before the end of a dead-end street, in the northeastern section of town, but west of the bar. She was Catholic and had a child and a male friend who was a car salesman rather than a mechanic.

We asked Seth about the incident. In this case, he said, Mrs. Brian had used him as a symbol of her inner self, or supraconsciousness, to deliver help and healing influences as well as advice. The experience helped the woman to use her own abilities, and the idea of Seth enabled her to activate her own healing forces. Seth told me not to concern myself. Apparently he is delighted to inspire others in such a fashion and serve as a focal point for their own creative energies.

Since we had read little psychic literature when the sessions began, everything was new to us. It wasn’t until much later that we discovered that some of Seth’s concepts had appeared in esoteric manuscripts dating back thousands of years. As our own knowledge increased, however, we found that in some critical areas Seth’s ideas departed from those generally accepted in much spiritualist and metaphysical literature.

For one thing, Seth does not agree on the existence of one historical Christ, though he grants the legitimacy of the Christ spirit—as you will see later in this book. While he sees reincarnation as a fact, he places it in an entirely different time context, and reconciles the theory with the idea of “simultaneous” time. Perhaps more important, he describes reincarnation as only a small part of our entire development. Other equally important existences occur in other non-physical dimensions.

All of this is interwound with the idea that personality is composed of action. Seth’s description of the three creative dilemmas upon which identity rests is thought-provoking and original. His ideas on God are a natural and fascinating extension of these theories.

To our knowledge at least, the inverted time theory and the system of probabilities are entirely original with the Seth Material. Seth’s idea of the nature of pain is also quite divorced, I believe, from current metaphysical thought. He views suffering as simply an attribute of consciousness and an indication of vitality, considered alarming only by those areas of identity that still fear death as an end.