“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Not too long ago, a young psychology professor called and asked me to speak to his class at the local college. It was a small group of about fifteen students, so I suggested that they come to my apartment instead. The man’s attitude was apparent the minute he came in the door. Personally he wouldn’t touch a medium with a ten-foot pole, but since they did exist and he knew of one, he felt duty-bound to “expose” his students to the phenomenon. And undoubtedly, he patted himself on the back for his broad-mindedness.

For two and a half hours I spoke on the potentials of human personality, and the necessity of recognizing, developing, and using them. To the best of my ability, I explained what telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition were, and what experiments might be conducted to show them in operation. Finally I suggested an exercise to be done by the students, such as we sometimes use in my own classes. A target sketch was to be tacked on the inside of my door each day. The girls would try to “pick up” an impression of the target drawing and reproduce it. I would mail my drawings to the professor at the end of the allotted time, and he could judge the hits and misses for himself.

Carefully—I thought!—I explained that suggestion was very important, and asked the professor to have an objective attitude during the tests. But, as I later discovered through one of his students, his attitude was anything but objective and hardly scientific. He let the class know through his statements and general behavior that he thought such tests were beneath serious consideration. Oddly enough, the results weren’t bad at all, but his attitude was so poor that only five girls took part in the experiment. I suggested that he try the experiment too, but he wouldn’t; and his attitude discouraged enough students so that he could say, later, that the low number participating made tests results impossible to evaluate. He dismissed all of the hits made as coincidence.

This episode and a few similar ones have made me wary of such encounters with so-called objective academicians. But all psychologists aren’t so narrow-minded and intellectually rigid. Last year one of my students was taking a psychology course in the local college night sessions, and with the professor’s encouragement, she frequently discussed Seth and our ESP classes. My student wanted to do one of her required papers on the nature of personality as explained by Seth. She asked Seth if he would give a special session for this purpose. She wanted to record it and play it for the college class.

Seth agreed, and devoted one entire class to the session. He had some interesting things to say about his own reality, too. In a way, it is not the kind of in-depth discussion Seth would give in one of our private sessions, but it contains an excellent thumbnail description of his theories on personality, for those who have no previous knowledge of the Seth Material. For that reason, I’ll use excerpts from it to open this chapter.

There were about ten of my regular students at the session. Seth was at his best: smiling, often breaking up serious material with a few light jokes or comments. Most of the time he spoke directly to the student who requested the session, or addressed the sixty members of her psychology class, who were not present. The whole session ran about six single-typed pages.

Then Seth addressed the members of the college class for whom the recording would be played. We all thought, later, that this session was hilarious in one way—a personality invisible in our terms, addressing an absent psychology class on the nature of personality! Yet Seth certainly knew what he was doing, for he used his own unorthodox method of communication as a case in point.

“I have helped him, in that his own personality operates more effectively. He is able to use his own abilities more fully. But that is hardly a psychological crime. The facts are, dear psychology class and professor, that all of you are more than you know. Each of you exists in other realities and other dimensions, and the self that you call yourself is but a small portion of your entire identity.

Then, smiling, Seth went further into the question of his own existence—and mine. He began by stating that he had always cautioned me to maintain a good balance between solitude and activity. Then he spoke to the professor of the psychology class:

The psychology class was as much interested in Seth’s reality as in the nature of personality, as he well knew. Smiling, Seth said, “One other point: These sessions are scheduled, and therefore operate under certain controlled conditions. Ruburt’s own personality is in no way threatened by them, and his ego has been carefully coddled and protected. It has not been shunted aside. Instead it has been taught new abilities. … I was not artificially ‘brought to birth’ through hypnosis. There was no artificial tampering of personality characteristics here. There was no hysteria. Ruburt allows me to use the nervous system under highly controlled conditions. I am not given a blanket permission to take over when I please, nor would I desire such an arrangement. I have other things to do.”

Seth ended this discussion by outlining various ways to develop awareness of the inner self. This material will be given in a later chapter. My student played the tape during her next college class, and since it ran longer than the allotted time, the psychology professor and some of the students went to her house later to hear the whole tape and discuss it.