“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.”

“How would I know the difference? Is there any way to distinguish between reality and illusion other than by a creation of my own mind?”

“You do not know it now. When that point is reached, you will be able, if you prefer, to experience any ‘reality … illusion’ at your will, but the self who experiences these ‘reality … illusions’ will know itself as reality. There is no place for it to go, because it is the only reality, and will create its own environment.”

“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.”

“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. …”

“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.”

“I’ll drop them a short note, thanking them for their interest or something. Seth can do what he wants. I doubt he’ll do anything.”

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.

“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.

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!)

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.

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.

Rob and I didn’t know what to make of the affair. It certainly seemed to give some kind of evidence for Seth’s independent nature, unless Phil hallucinated the voice and Seth took advantage of the fact and claimed it as his own. If so (and I doubt it), then Seth certainly had information about the woman and the affair that Phil didn’t have.

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.

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.

He absolutely refuses to let people use him as a crutch—this goes for me, too—and maintains that the Seth Material itself provides a means by which people can understand themselves better, reevaluate their reality, and change it. Despite the sessions held now and then to help particular persons, and despite their incidents of extrasensory perception, the sessions remain focused primarily on the material. It is here we feel that the real significance of the sessions rests.

We are far more interested in the Seth Material than in demonstrations of ESP, and we always were. We think it offers excellent explanations as to how ESP or any perception works, and to us this is far more important. We also accept Seth’s statements as meaningful, significant explanations of the nature of reality and mankind’s position within it. His theories as to the multidimensional personality are not only intellectually provocative but emotionally challenging. They offer each individual the opportunity to enlarge his own sense of identity and purpose.

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.

“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.