“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Certainly such matters were far from my mind. To my knowledge, I’d never had a psychic experience in my life, and I didn’t know anyone who had. Nothing in my background prepared me for the astonishing evening of September 9, 1963, yet it was this event, I’m sure, that initiated the sessions and my introduction to Seth.

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!

But more: I just didn’t know, for example, that everything had its own consciousness. Now I suddenly felt the fantastic vitality present even in things I’d previously considered inanimate. A nail was sticking in the windowsill, and I experienced ever so briefly the consciousness of the atoms and molecules that composed it.

Those ideas were only a touchstone for what would come later. The manuscript finally consisted of about a hundred pages, including new definitions of old terms. For example: “The subconscious is the threshold of idea’s emergence into the individual conscious mind. It connects the entity and the individual. … The physical body is the material construction of the entity’s idea of itself under the properties of matter. … Instinct is the minimum ability for idea construction necessary for physical survival. … The present is the apparent point of any idea’s emergence into physical matter.”

“Hon, you’re out of your mind. I don’t know a thing about ESP, that’s why not. Besides, that’s nonfiction. I’ve never done anything but fiction and poetry in my life.”

We were surprised that the board worked for us. I thought it was a riot, two adults watching the pointer go scurrying across the board, and we didn’t take it too seriously. For one thing, of course, neither of us particularly believed in life after death—certainly not conscious life, capable of communicating. Later on, we did learn that a man with the communicator’s name was known to have lived in Elmira, and died in the 1940’s—that took me back a bit. But we were much more interested in finding out what made the pointer move than in the messages it gave.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS LIKE A FLOWER WITH MANY PETALS, replied the pointer.

“Maybe he’s a part of both of our subconscious minds in a way we don’t understand,” I said.

A BOARD IS NEUTRAL. MESSAGES IN THE MIND ARE NOT.

“Was the image conscious of Bill’s presence?”

IN SOME SUBMERGED MANNER, ALL FRAGMENTS OF A PERSONALITY EXIST WITHIN AN ENTITY, WITH THEIR OWN INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS …

The pointer paused. I felt as if I were standing, shivering, on the top of a high diving board, trying to make myself jump while all kinds of people were waiting impatiently behind me. Actually it was the words that pushed at me—they seemed to rush through my mind. In some crazy fashion I felt as if they’d back up, piles of nouns and verbs in my head until they closed everything else off if I didn’t speak them. And without really knowing how or why, I opened up my mouth and let them out. For the first time I began to speak for Seth, continuing the sentences the board had spelled out only a moment before.

“When Bill saw the image and reocgnized its presence, the fragment itself seemed to have a dream. The entity operates its fragments in what you would call a subconscious manner, that is, without conscious direction. The entity gives the fragment independent life, then the entity more or less forgets the fragment. When a momentary lapse of control occurs, they both come face to face. It’s as impossible for the entity to control fragment personalities as for the conscious mind to control the body’s heartbeat.”