“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.

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.

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.”

Now Seth said: “The ‘joke’ is highly relevant. If you realized thoroughly that your physical world was an illusion, you would not be experiencing sense data.”

“Yes. That was the comment to Siddhartha.”

Dr. Barnard was kind enough to write a letter to the publishers of this present book, giving his opinions and mentioning that session (Number 303). (More than this, he let me use his real name, rather than hiding behind a pseudonym.) In his letter he said: In the session “I chose topics of conversation which were clearly of tolerable interest to Seth and considerable interest to me, and which by that time I had every reason to believe were largely foreign territory to Jane. Also … I chose to pursue these topics at a level of sophistication which I felt, at least, made it exceedingly improbable that Jane could fool me on; substituting her own knowledge and mental footwork for those of Seth, even if she were doing it unconsciously. …

“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. …”

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.

“It was registered, and I had to sign for it,” I said. “How about that? It’s from two brothers out in California someplace, and they want to know what Seth can tell them about themselves.”

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.

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:

In here, because of the specific material, Rob began to wonder if projection was involved. “Are you at the location now?” he asked.

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.

“What time of day is it?” Rob asked. (It was after 9 P.M. in Elmira.)

“Early evening. There are fairly thin wooden posts, not round, rectangular at the top, you see, perhaps hip-level.” Seth gestured to Rob, to show the shape and size of the posts. At the same time, I floated above them, puzzled because I couldn’t see what they were being used for; I was also mystified by their rectangular tops.

“Then a bay effect to the left. The land is like this, you see, not straight. The land here curves and juts out again.” Here again Seth gestured broadly to indicate the shape of the seacoast. He also said that the family had a strong foreign connection, though the name was not particularly foreign, and made some other remarks about the family’s history and members.

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.

The brothers lived in Chula Vista, a place I’d never visited. They lived in a pink stucco house with two bedrooms to the rear. The corner was two houses to the right. The house itself was half a mile from San Diego Bay. Numerous sand dunes were nearby and wooden posts, exactly as described, were scattered along the dunes.

The family had come from Australia and hoped to return. Several other impressions, not mentioned here, were also right, others wrong: For example, Seth said that the mother was dead. Actually she was quite alive, though the family had cut her off emotionally and she did not always live at home.

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!)

“The voice was male, was it not?” Seth asked.

“Was it your voice? It happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to think,” Phil said, grinning. As Seth, I nodded humorously.

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.

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.

Obviously, according to Seth, we can change the future. As he told Phil: “At no time are events predestined. With every moment you change, and every action changes every other action. I am able to look from a different perspective, but still see only probabilities. On that particular evening I saw a probability that was not attractive. You and I changed it.”

Exactly a week later Bill called us, sounding very nervous. He told me that something very strange had happened, and since he was still upset about it, he thought he’d discuss it with me. Instantly I remembered my own experience, and told Bill to wait while Rob got my notes, so I could check them as Bill talked. Bill told me that exactly a week before he had been awakened suddenly. Seth stood by his bed, fully three-dimensional, looking just like Rob’s painting of him. He shook Bill’s shoulder and disappeared. Bill told his mother at breakfast the next morning, and wrote a report out for us.

The incident upset his mother, who made some joking comment to the effect that she wished Seth and I would stay at home. Only I don’t think she was joking. It was Bill’s uneasiness that kept him from calling earlier, and I didn’t want to call and prompt him.

First of all, I thought I had been in a crowded room in my out-of-body experience, but Bill was obviously in his room, alone. Another thing, he saw Seth smoking a cigarette; I smoke. Did Bill hallucinate Seth’s three-dimensional image? If so, he did this at the same time that I felt I was with him. And he felt Seth shake his shoulder while in my experience I shook it.

Considerably startled, she did as she was told. In that instant the headache vanished. By the next day she felt better than she had in six months. She began to take walks again and felt rejuvenated. When she told me the story, I just nodded and smiled. Quite frankly, I didn’t know what else to do.

Demonstrations of ESP in sessions have always had a purpose: either to help increase my confidence or train my abilities, to illustrate a point made in the material, or to offer information to someone in need. It’s easy for me to forget my earlier feelings that Seth should prove himself; easy for me to forget that I, too, insisted on my “wonders,” and on several occasions even denied the evidence of my own senses out of the mistaken belief that I was somehow being more scientific that way. I will say that I always highly respected the Seth Material, and recognized the scope and daring of some of the concepts it contains.

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.

But from now on I’ll let Seth speak for himself. I’ve chosen excerpts dealing with the subjects at hand. In some cases, Seth gave demonstrations to make his point. In the chapter on health, for example, I’ve included excerpts from some readings for specific people. I’ve followed the same procedure with the data on reincarnation. To explain his theories on the nature of physical reality, I’m using excerpts from a session in which he really demonstrated that he knew what he was talking about—if an apparition in the living room can pass as a legitimate approximation.