“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The year 1963 had been a poor one for us, though. Rob had severe back trouble, and hardly felt well enough to paint when he came home from work. I was having difficulties settling on another book idea. Our old pet dog, Mischa, had died. Perhaps these circumstances made me more aware than usual of our human vulnerability, but certainly many people have had difficult years with no resulting emergence of psychic phenomena. Perhaps, all unknowing, I had reached a crisis and my psychic abilities awoke as the result of inner need.

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.

Despite all my previous ideas and common sense, I knew that time wasn’t a series of moments one before the other, each one like a clothespin stuck on a line, but that all experience existed in some kind of eternal now. All of this was scribbled down so fast—and I still have that manuscript. Even now it fills me with that sense of discovery and revelation:

“Is all of this Jane’s subconscious talking?” Rob asked.

TO GOD, ALL NAMES ARE HIS NAME, the pointer spelled.

All this was spelled out so quickly that we could hardly keep our hands on the pointer. Despite myself, I leaned closer. The back of my neck prickled. What was going on?

There was a pause. We didn’t know what to ask or how to proceed. Finally Rob said, “Could you tell me why I had all that back trouble earlier this year?

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.

I hardly heard Rob ask the question. Through the whole session I’d been hearing the words in my head before they were spelled, and I’d felt the impulse to speak them. Now the impulse grew stronger and I grew more determined to fight it. Yet I was terribly curious. And what could happen, after all? I didn’t know—and this made me even more curious.

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.

NOT VERY GOOD. ANY CONTACTS ON YOUR PART WILL PROBABLY INCLUDE INTERNAL VISUAL DATA. JANE WILL PROBABLY BE ABLE TO RECEIVE ME DIRECT. IN EITHER CASE, CONTACT IS NOT POSSIBLE AT ALL TIMES. YOU WOULD FIND THIS MORE EMBARRASSING THAN I WOULD.