“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.

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.

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.

I’d also like to mention here that I believe psychic ability itself is an outcropping or extension of creative abilities, inherent in each of us, and therefore normal rather than supranormal. As you’ll see later, however, I do think that these abilities are attributes of another portion of our personalities with which we’re relatively unfamiliar. I think, then, that normal creative abilities, stepped up, tune us into other dimensions of reality.