“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.

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.

During that experience I knew that we formed physical matter, not the other way around; that our senses showed us only one three-dimensional reality out of an infinite number that we couldn’t ordinarily perceive; that we could trust our senses only so far and only so long as we did not ask questions that were beyond their limited scope of knowledge.

“We are individualized portions of energy, materialized within physical existence, to learn to form ideas from energy, and make them physical (this is idea construction). We project ideas into an object, so that we can deal with it. But the object is the thought, materialized. This physical representation of idea permits us to learn the difference between the ‘I’ who thinks and the thought. Idea construction teaches the ‘I’ what it is, by showing it its own products in a physical manner. We learn by viewing our own creations, in other words. We learn the power and effects of ideas by changing them into physical realities; and we learn responsibility in the use of creative energy. …

Those ideas were only a touchstone for what would come later. The manuscript finally consisted of about a hundred pages, including new definitions of old terms. For example: “The subconscious is the threshold of idea’s emergence into the individual conscious mind. It connects the entity and the individual. … The physical body is the material construction of the entity’s idea of itself under the properties of matter. … Instinct is the minimum ability for idea construction necessary for physical survival. … The present is the apparent point of any idea’s emergence into physical matter.”

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.

“I know,” Rob said. “But you’re interested in dreams, certainly after those two particular ones you had. And what do you call that experience you had last month? Besides, the books we’ve seen have dealt only with well-known mediums. But what about ordinary people? What if everyone has those abilities?” I stared at him. He’d turned quite serious. “Couldn’t you work out a series of experiments and try them out? Use yourself as a guinea pig.”

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.)

“What was her first name?”
     URSULA

“What was her last name?”
     ALTERI

“What was your nationality?”
     ENGLISH

“What was her nationality?”
     ITALIAN

“In what year were you born?”
     1885

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.

From the first few messages, Frank Withers had insisted upon the validity of reincarnation, so Rob said, “What do you think of your various reincarnations?”

THEY ARE WHAT I AM, BUT I WILL BE MORE. PUN: THE WHOLE IS THE SUM OF ITS HEARTS.

SUBCONSCIOUS IS A CORRIDOR. WHAT DIFERENCE DOES IT MAKE WHICH DOOR YOU TRAVEL THROUGH?

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?”

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?

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

WHAT’S TO CLEAR? replied the pointer.

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?

“Oh, hon,” I said, rather disgusted. “Besides, what purpose would he have? If there are spirits, they must have better things to do than going around moving Ouija boards.”

“What did you say, Ruburt?” Rob asked. I could have crowned him.

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.

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.

“When Bill saw the image and reocgnized its presence, the fragment itself seemed to have a dream. The entity operates its fragments in what you would call a subconscious manner, that is, without conscious direction. The entity gives the fragment independent life, then the entity more or less forgets the fragment. When a momentary lapse of control occurs, they both come face to face. It’s as impossible for the entity to control fragment personalities as for the conscious mind to control the body’s heartbeat.”

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.”

Then we both put our hands back on it. “What did you think of that, Seth?” Rob asked.

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.