“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

It was as if the physical world were really tissue-paper thin, hiding infinite dimensions of reality, and I was suddenly flung through the tissue paper with a huge ripping sound. My body sat at the table, my hands furiously scribbling down the words and ideas that flashed through my head. Yet I seemed to be somewhere else, at the same time, traveling through things. I went plummeting through a leaf, to find a whole universe open up; and then out again, drawn into new perspectives.

I felt as if knowledge was being implanted in the very cells of my body so that I couldn’t forget it—a gut knowing, a biological spirituality. It was feeling and knowing, rather than intellectual knowledge. At the same time I remembered having a dream the night before, which I had forgotten, in which this same sort of experience had occurred. And I knew the two were connected.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

So we began. We settled on the Ouija board first, because it seemed the least complicated of our various experiments. Our landlady found a board in the attic and we borrowed it. Actually both of us were a little embarrassed the first few times we tried the board. My attitude was, “Well, let’s get this out of the way so we can really get down to the things we’re interested in, like telepathy and clairvoyance.” No wonder our first attempts were failures.

The third time we tried it, the little pointer finally began to move beneath our fingertips. It spelled out messages supposedly coming from a Frank Withers (not the real name) who had lived in Elmira and died during the 1940’s.

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.

This was the first time the pointer spelled complete sentences. I laughed.

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

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.

Once more the words just stopped. This time I was determined not to let the same thing happen again until I had time to think it over, and I told Rob. Still we agreed to check with the board. “Was Jane’s answer right, Seth?” Rob asked.

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.

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.