“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.

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!

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.

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.

Our curiosity was aroused, to say the least. At a newsstand we noticed a book on ESP. The words “Clairvoyant Dreams” popped up from the cover, and we bought it. About this time I was also looking for a new book idea, and Rob made the suggestion that was to lead us further and further away from the way of life we’d always known.

“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.

The next time we tried a few days later, Frank Withers said that he had been a soldier in Turkey during one life, and insisted (through the board) that he had known Rob and me in a city called Triev, in Denmark, in still another life. Dates and locations were given, though it was made clear that Triev no longer exists.

“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.”