“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.

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.

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.

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:

Apparently I’d reached a point where these abilities were ready to show themselves, so they did. Because of my early training as a writer, they emerged through words, rather than, say, visions, and in an experience that wouldn’t frighten me too much.

The paperback we’d just purchased was on the coffee table between us as we sat talking. “I’ve got outlines for three novels, and none of them really please me,” I said.

Put that way, Rob’s idea made sense. I could investigate a subject that now intrigued me, and do a book at the same time.

“You and your suggestions,” I countered. By now I was really having second thoughts. We’d never been to a medium. We’d never had a telepathic experience in our lives, never even seen a Ouija board. On the other hand, I thought, what did I have to lose? (It wasn’t until much later that I remembered that another of Rob’s suggestions had launched me into fiction in the first place.)

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.

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.

“Can you tell us more?” Rob asked. “If you call me Joseph, what do you call Jane?”

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?

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.