“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.

It was a lovely autumn evening. After supper I sat down at my old table in the living room, as I always did, to work on my poetry. Rob was painting in the back studio, three rooms away. I took out my pen and paper and settled down with my ninth or tenth cup of coffee for the day, and my cigarettes. Willie, our cat, dozed on the blue rug.

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.

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!

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.

But more: I just didn’t know, for example, that everything had its own consciousness. Now I suddenly felt the fantastic vitality present even in things I’d previously considered inanimate. A nail was sticking in the windowsill, and I experienced ever so briefly the consciousness of the atoms and molecules that composed it.

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:

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.

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.

Somewhat to my surprise he answered quickly, and he was quite enthusiastic. What he wanted was three or four sample chapters. Rob and I were delighted, but somewhat appalled too, as we looked over the chapter headings I’d listed for the book: “A Do-It-Yourself Séance,” “Telepathy, Fact or Fiction?”, “How to Work the Ouija.”

“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.)

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.

“What was her first name?”
     URSULA

“What was her last name?”
     ALTERI

“What was your nationality?”
     ENGLISH

“What was her nationality?”
     ITALIAN

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.

Then, on December 8, 1963, we sat at the board again, wondering whether or not it would work. It was a comfortable evening, warm in the room. Snow fell past the windows. Then suddenly the pointer began to move so quickly that we could hardly keep up with it.

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.

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

“Maybe it’s your subconscious,” I said to Rob, but he was already asking another question:

YES. I PREFER NOT TO BE CALLED FRANK WITHERS. THAT PERSONALITY WAS RATHER COLORLESS.

Rob and I shrugged at each other: this was really wild, and the pointer was speeding faster and faster. Rob waited a moment, then asked, “What would you prefer to be called?”

Now Withers was getting religious! I rolled my eyes and pretended to stare out the window.

All this was spelled out so quickly that we could hardly keep our hands on the pointer. Despite myself, I leaned closer. The back of my neck prickled. What was going on?

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?

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 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.

In the meantime we had told a friend of ours, Bill Macdonell, what we were doing. Bill in turn had told us about an apparition he’d seen a few years earlier when he was an art student. He’d never mentioned such a thing before. Now Rob asked what Bill had seen.

“Was the image conscious of Bill’s presence?”

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 nodded, bewildered. “Dimly, as if a radio program was going on in my head from some other station.” I paused and put my hands back on the pointer, thinking that I’d had enough of this speaking—or whatever it was—for one night.

I relaxed a little; the pointer was taking over the messages again. But Rob asked another question.

Again the words were speeding through my head while the little pointer spelled them out slowly and methodically. I remember a terrific impatience, and then I was finishing the message aloud: “They have to be translated into physical reality. Fragments of another sort, called personality fragments, operate independently, though under the auspices of the entity.”

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.

“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.

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.