“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

CHAPTER
NINE:

A Psychologist and Seth Talk
about Existence—Another Out-of-Body

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.

I was really excited to think that a psychologist would do his own experimentation with projection, and I wrote him. We corresponded for a while, and then in November of 1966, Gene and his wife visited us. We got along beautifully. He never made me feel that I had to prove anything, which was pretty tricky of him actually, since he wanted to satisfy himself as to the authenticity of the Seth sessions.

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.

“The best summary description I can give you of that evening is that it was for me a delightful conversation with a personality or intelligence or what have you, whose wit, intellect, and reservoir of knowledge far exceeded my own. … In any sense in which a psychologist of the Western scientific tradition would understand the phrase, I do not believe that Jane Roberts and Seth are the same person, or the same personality, or different facets of the same personality. …”

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!)