“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

CHAPTER
ONE:

We Meet Seth

The circumstances leading up to the Seth sessions still surprise me. I wasn’t drifting, looking for a sense of purpose, for example. My first novel had just been published in paperback, and all my energies were channeled into becoming a good novelist and poet. I considered nonfiction the field of journalists, not creative writers. I thought my life and work were planned, my course set. Yet here I am, writing my third book of nonfiction.

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.

When I came to, I found myself scrawling what was obviously meant as the title of that odd batch of notes: The Physical Universe As Idea Construction. Later the Seth Material would develop those ideas, but I didn’t know that at the time. In one of the early sessions Seth said that this had been his first attempt to contact me. I only know that if I’d begun speaking for Seth that night, I would have been terrified.

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.

YOU MAY CALL ME WHATEVER YOU CHOOSE. I CALL MYSELF SETH. IT FITS THE ME OF ME, THE PERSONALITY MORE CLEARLY APPROXIMATING THE WHOLE SELF I AM, OR AM TRYING TO BE. JOSEPH IS YOUR WHOLE SELF, MORE OR LESS, THE IMAGE OF THE SUM OF YOUR VARIOUS PERSONALITIES IN THE PAST AND FUTURE.

These are only a few excerpts from that first session with Seth. (A few weeks later, though, Rob had some more difficulty with his back and went to a chiropractor who told him that his first vertebra was out of alignment.) The session lasted until after midnight, and after that we sat up talking about it.

Seth had a purpose, all right: to deliver the material he’s been giving us twice a week, now, like clockwork for the past five years. But we didn’t know that then. While this was already our fourth session at the board, it was really our first Seth session.

The next two were much the same, except for one bewildering element: I began to anticipate the board’s replies. This bothered me no end, and I grew uneasy. At the next session—our fourth with Seth—I heard the words in my head at a faster and faster rate, and not only sentences but whole paragraphs before they were spelled out.

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.

“Seth, would you verify Jane’s reception of the above message?” Rob asked.

Once more the words just stopped. This time I was determined not to let the same thing happen again until I had time to think it over, and I told Rob. Still we agreed to check with the board. “Was Jane’s answer right, Seth?” Rob asked.

Then we both put our hands back on it. “What did you think of that, Seth?” Rob asked.

I don’t know what Rob would have thought then if he’d realized what Seth meant by “internal visual data,” though; and writing this now I just remembered that he was pretty surprised when his first few internal visions appeared with extraordinary vividness. I’ll describe these later. That night, of course, we were primarily concerned with my speaking experience. If I’d known how this was to be expanded in the next session, I probably would have been a nervous wreck.

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.

On December 8, then, Seth introduced himself. On the 15th I spoke for him for the first time. Soon, freed completely from the board, his personality began to express itself with much greater freedom. The process is fascinating to watch. For this reason I’ll devote some space to the early sessions so that you can become acquainted with the material as Seth gave it, and see him emerge as a personality in his own right.