“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.

The professor was intelligent, personable, earnest. Had we met under different circumstances, I probably would have liked him. But he didn’t want to reconsider or evaluate his preconceived ideas of the nature of personality. He missed an opportunity to broaden his outlook, and, perhaps, to find the kind of evidence that would convince him that human personality was far less limited than he supposed.

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.

“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:

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.