“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.

On May 3, 1967, Peg and Bill Gallagher dropped in for our regular Monday night session, and as we sat around chatting, I told them about a letter I’d just received that amused me—and sort of outraged me at the same time.

But, as often happens when I try to second-guess Seth, I was really wrong. Our session, the 339th, started shortly afterward, and almost immediately I left my body, though I had little sensation of doing so. I just found myself hovering in midair, looking down on a particular neighborhood that was obviously someplace in Southern California. Back in the living room, Seth was describing what I was seeing, but I was only distantly aware of his voice. To me it sounded far less distinct than a very poor long-distance telephone call.

Rob sent a copy of the session to the two brothers. They sent back a tape in which they evaluated the information. Later they signed a statement which is in our files. Seth’s information about their house was right in every particular, including the data on the area, and the shape of the seacoast there.

Again, this experience suggested all kinds of questions concerning Seth’s and my relationship in an out-of-body episode. Presumably he stays in my body, while I go out of it, but this is a simplification, I’m sure. We’re still accumulating information on such questions, both through sessions and through work on our own.

Our Monday and Wednesday sessions, where Seth develops the theoretical material, are still private, although a guest may drop in occasionally. Seth sometimes does hold a session for my ESP students on class night, and in class he deals with the practical application of the material.

Actually the only person who has attended our private sessions with any regularity is Phillip. Seth has given him information concerning his business dealings, correctly predicting the behavior of certain stocks among other things; and Phil is keeping record of Seth’s percentage of “hits.” The time ranges for some of the predictions cover several years, but Seth has been correct about a large number of items that Phil has been able to check. Seth doesn’t make a habit of giving advice in sessions, though: he insists that people make their own decisions.

During our first break, Phil explained: A month earlier he’d been speaking to a young woman in a local bar, when he heard a clear, loud, male voice say, “No, no,” very emphatically. It seemed to come from within Phil’s head. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before, and he was so startled that he muttered a quick excuse to the woman and left the 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.

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.

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.