“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

One day while we were still up to our necks in tests, I saw an Associated Press article that really surprised me. Dr. Eugene Barnard, a psychologist then at North Carolina State University, came out publicly with a statement favoring astral projection. He said that he had propected his consciousness out of his body, and that no hallucination was involved. The article also gave details concerning his academic research in the field of parapsychology.

We had a fascinating session one night, lasting several hours. Not until it was over did I realize what he’d been up to—now that’s a good psychologist! Gene had questioned Seth in what I guess you could call “professional philosophical jargon,” making frequent references to esoteric Eastern theories with which I was totally unfamiliar. Gene has his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds, England, in experimental psychology, and taught at Cambridge. He also had an excellent knowledge of Eastern philosophy and religion. Yet Seth not only took him on, but in some way I still don’t understand, he used Gene’s own terminology and jargon to beat him at his own game—and with humor and grace.

This session ran fourteen typewritten pages, and is so of one piece that it’s difficult to give excerpts, without including a good bit of background information. Here are portions of the last half of the session. Earlier, Seth and Gene had been discussing reality, and Gene had commented that existence was “kind of a lovely colossal joke.” Seth answered that “it is no joke. It is a means for the Whole to know Itself.”

“We have come full circle. I am one with what reality I create. There is nowhere to go,” Gene said.

“You must still be able to experience any one of these illusions, knowing they are illusory, with full knowledge of their nature, and still know that the basic reality is yourself. There is no place to go because you are the place—and all places—in those terms. But the ‘joke’ is relevant. The most important thing I have said this evening is that the joke is relevant. You must be free enough to explore the nature and experience of each living thing within your own system, knowing that it is yourself, and then leave your system. These must be direct experiences.”

“Is there really more than one viewpoint?”

“I would be willing to grant a multiplicity of illusory forms of that same thing … namely, you and I. All one …”

“To do that is to have opened an eye and to see that there is but one short step to take.”

“There is a holy irreverence and a flighty irreverence. You are playing a game. They are both one. But you had better be certain that you know this thoroughly.”

Shortly after their visit, my book, How to Develop Your ESP Power, finally appeared in the bookstores. I began to get some mail, though I was hardly deluged. One of these early letters was responsible for my next out-of-body trip during a Seth session.

Now in here, I was changing my position in the air. As far as I can figure out, I was the one at the location, not Seth.

As always, when things like this check out, I smile all over. I’ve never been one to accept other people’s word about the nature of things, even though at times I have accepted more than I should have. I’ve always wanted to find out for myself. No one could have been more critical about his own experiences than I have—while still maintaining enough freedom to experiment. So after this episode, I began to relax. I’d been out of my body again, and again things had checked out. How did Seth help me do this? How could he record my perceptions when my consciousness was across the continent? I was more intellectually intrigued than I can say. One thing I knew: He was pretty tricky—sending me “out” without my prior conscious knowledge of what he was planning. I do much better that way, because I don’t feel that I’m being tested, and I don’t have time to fret about results. (He’s a good psychologist, too!)

This experience and my new confidence obviously made other later developments possible. Other strangers wrote, some urgently wanting help of one kind or another. While Seth insists that help comes from within, he did offer excellent advice to a few, along with correct clairvoyant impressions of their environments—probably to let me know we had the right person more than anything else.

We really never know what is going to happen in a session, and one night Seth really surprised us. That night Phil turned up, unannounced as always. He told us he’d received a raise. With a comic shrug he left the amount up in the air. When the session started, Seth promptly named the amount to the dollar, smiling broadly. Then Phil asked Seth if he knew anything about a voice that he’d heard in a local bar.

Seth admitted that he was the one who spoke to Phil. After our break he said, “The woman is grasping in a way that is disastrous to those with whom she comes in contact.” He added that the woman “would have used you as a buffer between herself and another male, and as a bargaining point, exaggerating your slightest interest. An unpleasant situation would have resulted. Because you listened to me, the probable future was changed.” Then he gave considerable background information, saying that the woman had a child and was involved with another man. “The male involved with her has something to do with mechanics.” He also said that she was a Catholic, and that her problem concerned a legal paper.

In another episode, a friend claimed to have seen Seth, and under peculiar curcumstances. One night as I lay in bed I had a spontaneous out-of-body experience in which I seemed to be in a crowded room speaking urgently to Bill Macdonnel (our artist friend). I shook his shoulder none too gently and instantly snapped back to my body. I hadn’t been in bed ten minutes yet and I got up immediately, wrote down what happened, and told Rob.

One day I met Mrs. Brian, a former student who dropped out of class due to illness, who told me she had read a newspaper article about this present book that appeared in the local paper. It contained a few excerpts of the Seth Material, and a reproduction of Rob’s painting of Seth. Mrs. Brian had a terrific headache while reading the article; suddenly she thought she felt Seth’s presence. An inner voice, presumably Seth’s, told her that she had been feeling sorry for herself, that she must stop brooding over her health at once, get up, and go out for a walk. If so, she would improve at once.

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.

“You create your reality according to your beliefs and expectations, therefore it behooves you to examine them carefully. If you do not like your world, then examine your own expectations. Every thought in one way or another is constructed by you in physical terms.

“Your world is formed in faithful replica of your own thoughts. … Certain telepathic conditions exist that we call root assumptions, of which each individual is subconsciously aware. Using these, you form a physical environment cohesive enough so that there is general agreement as to objects and their placement and dimension. It is all hallucinatory in one respect, and yet it is your reality, and you must manipulate within it. The world in which your parents live existed first in thought. It existed once in the stuff of dreams, and they spawned their universe from this, and from this they made their world.