“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It was as if the physical world were really tissue-paper thin, hiding infinite dimensions of reality, and I was suddenly flung through the tissue paper with a huge ripping sound. My body sat at the table, my hands furiously scribbling down the words and ideas that flashed through my head. Yet I seemed to be somewhere else, at the same time, traveling through things. I went plummeting through a leaf, to find a whole universe open up; and then out again, drawn into new perspectives.

As it was, I didn’t know what had happened, yet even then I felt that my life had suddenly changed. The word “revelation” came to mind and I tried to dismiss it, yet the word was apt. I was simply afraid of the term with its mystical implications. I was familiar with inspiration in my own work, but this was as different from ordinary inspiration as a bird is from a worm!

The ideas that I “received” were just as startling. They turned all my ideas of reality upside down. That morning and each morning until that time, I’d been sure of one thing: you could trust physical reality. You might not like it at times, but you could depend on it. You could change your ideas toward it if you chose, but this would in no way change what reality was. Now I could never feel that way again.

During that experience I knew that we formed physical matter, not the other way around; that our senses showed us only one three-dimensional reality out of an infinite number that we couldn’t ordinarily perceive; that we could trust our senses only so far and only so long as we did not ask questions that were beyond their limited scope of knowledge.

“We are individualized portions of energy, materialized within physical existence, to learn to form ideas from energy, and make them physical (this is idea construction). We project ideas into an object, so that we can deal with it. But the object is the thought, materialized. This physical representation of idea permits us to learn the difference between the ‘I’ who thinks and the thought. Idea construction teaches the ‘I’ what it is, by showing it its own products in a physical manner. We learn by viewing our own creations, in other words. We learn the power and effects of ideas by changing them into physical realities; and we learn responsibility in the use of creative energy. …

I think that this experience and the manuscript were extensions of the creative subconscious processes that are behind each creative act: normal creativity suddenly “turned on” or stepped up to an almost incredible degree. Enough energy was generated in that evening to change the direction of my life and my husband’s. For this reason I believe such experiences to be of utmost importance psychologically. I’m certain that the affair set off the emergence of my own unsuspected “psychic” abilities and acted as a trigger for the production of the Seth Material.

I’d also like to mention here that I believe psychic ability itself is an outcropping or extension of creative abilities, inherent in each of us, and therefore normal rather than supranormal. As you’ll see later, however, I do think that these abilities are attributes of another portion of our personalities with which we’re relatively unfamiliar. I think, then, that normal creative abilities, stepped up, tune us into other dimensions of reality.

Following this episode, even my ordinary subjective experiences began to change. Very shortly afterward I began to recall my dreams—suddenly, and for no apparent reason. It was like discovering a second life. Not only that, but in the next two months I had two vivid precognitive dreams, the first, to my knowledge, that I ever had.

Rob asked the questions, then we paused while he wrote out the answers the pointer spelled. Frank Withers had given simple one- or two-word responses in previous sessions. Now the answers became longer, and their character seemed to change. The atmosphere of the room was somehow different.

Again the words were speeding through my head while the little pointer spelled them out slowly and methodically. I remember a terrific impatience, and then I was finishing the message aloud: “They have to be translated into physical reality. Fragments of another sort, called personality fragments, operate independently, though under the auspices of the entity.”

In fact, the next month waited for us with experiences so startling that we nearly called the whole thing to a halt. Yet we felt light-hearted at the same time. If there was more to this world and reality than we suspected, we certainly wanted to find out. And we still are finding out, for new elements appear in the sessions even now. The Seth Material continues, and we still have countless questions we want answered.