“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

What happened next was like a “trip” without drugs. If someone had slipped me an LSD cube on the sly, the experience couldn’t have been more bizarre. Between one normal minute and the next, a fantastic avalanche of radical, new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force, as if my skull were some sort of receiving station, turned up to unbearable volume. Not only ideas came through this channel, but sensations, intensified and pulsating. I was tuned in, turned on—whatever you want to call it—connected to some incredible sorce of energy. I didn’t even have time to call out to Rob.

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.

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.

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.

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:

“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. …

“The basic idea is that the senses are developed, not to permit awareness of an already existing material world, but to create it. …”

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.

“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.”

“I know,” Rob said. “But you’re interested in dreams, certainly after those two particular ones you had. And what do you call that experience you had last month? Besides, the books we’ve seen have dealt only with well-known mediums. But what about ordinary people? What if everyone has those abilities?” I stared at him. He’d turned quite serious. “Couldn’t you work out a series of experiments and try them out? Use yourself as a guinea pig.”

The very next day I began. Within a week I’d developed a group of experiments designed to discover whether or not the ordinary person could develop extrasensory abilities. I did an outline for the book and shipped it off to my publisher, but without any great hopes.

Somewhat to my surprise he answered quickly, and he was quite enthusiastic. What he wanted was three or four sample chapters. Rob and I were delighted, but somewhat appalled too, as we looked over the chapter headings I’d listed for the book: “A Do-It-Yourself Séance,” “Telepathy, Fact or Fiction?”, “How to Work the Ouija.”

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.

THEY ARE WHAT I AM, BUT I WILL BE MORE. PUN: THE WHOLE IS THE SUM OF ITS HEARTS.

“Maybe it’s your subconscious,” I said to Rob, but he was already asking another question:

“But we still need some kind of name to use in talking to you,” Rob said.

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.

“But why is this cause for concern?” Rob asked, with, I thought at the time, a marvelously faked innocence.

I relaxed a little; the pointer was taking over the messages again. But Rob asked another question.

“I’m glad somebody thinks so,” I said to Rob, but now that things were safely back with the board, my curiosity was at me again. I told Rob to ask if one of us alone could work the pointer, and the pointer suggested that we try. Rob put his hands on the pointer and asked a question, but it barely moved.