“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.

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.

Rob asked the questions, then we paused while he wrote out the answers the pointer spelled. Frank Withers had given simple one- or two-word responses in previous sessions. Now the answers became longer, and their character seemed to change. The atmosphere of the room was somehow different.

These are only a few excerpts from that first session with Seth. (A few weeks later, though, Rob had some more difficulty with his back and went to a chiropractor who told him that his first vertebra was out of alignment.) The session lasted until after midnight, and after that we sat up talking about it.

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.

The next session started like the others. I was working afternoons at an art gallery, and after the dishes were done and Rob was through with painting for the day, we got out the board.

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.

“Hmm,” Rob said. We laughed and finally ended the session.

I don’t know what Rob would have thought then if he’d realized what Seth meant by “internal visual data,” though; and writing this now I just remembered that he was pretty surprised when his first few internal visions appeared with extraordinary vividness. I’ll describe these later. That night, of course, we were primarily concerned with my speaking experience. If I’d known how this was to be expanded in the next session, I probably would have been a nervous wreck.

In fact, the next month waited for us with experiences so startling that we nearly called the whole thing to a halt. Yet we felt light-hearted at the same time. If there was more to this world and reality than we suspected, we certainly wanted to find out. And we still are finding out, for new elements appear in the sessions even now. The Seth Material continues, and we still have countless questions we want answered.

On December 8, then, Seth introduced himself. On the 15th I spoke for him for the first time. Soon, freed completely from the board, his personality began to express itself with much greater freedom. The process is fascinating to watch. For this reason I’ll devote some space to the early sessions so that you can become acquainted with the material as Seth gave it, and see him emerge as a personality in his own right.