“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The matter of Seth’s sex also arises here. To me at least, the intuitive portions of most personalities seem to have a feminine rather than masculine cast. If Seth were just my higher intuitive self, I would expect him to be feminine or to be the pseudomasculine type of male character so frequently created by women writers. Usually males instantly recognize characters drawn in this manner as overly romantic. While Seth is not “blatantly” male, in his actions and speech he is more a man’s man than the woman’s man type. Men like him. While he is a teacher, he is not basically the stereotyped “spiritual guide” either. He is simply himself—which may, after all, be the badge of his own independent existence.

“I am, however, automatically a part of the message that I bring to you. At times I am ‘here’ more completely than in other sessions. These reasons often have to do with circumstances usually beyond normal control: electromagnetic conditions, psychological circumstances. These could be considered as atmospheric conditions through which I must travel.

“Again: the medium is the message in the Spacious Present,” Seth said, smiling, “and whenever the time for the program arrives, I am here in your present, regardless of where I am in what you would term my present. … I may prepare my film in advance when Ruburt is not consciously aware of it. This does not imply that such a session is less legitimate.”

“The teacher is within the tape; the personality is condensed. Your question stems from the feeling that if I am here, I cannot be someplace else at the same time, or that all of my energies must be focused here if I am here. There are aspects of my identity with which you are not acquainted … though at a ‘later’ time you may be.

Obviously I’ve avoided calling Seth a spirit and leaving it at that. I don’t like the phrase for one thing, and for another, I think that this is too easy an answer. In accepting one solution, we may be closing our minds to others that lie beneath. I am not saying that Seth is just a psychological structure allowing me to tune into revelational knowledge, nor denying that he has an independent existence. I do think that some kind of blending must take place in sessions between his personality and mine, and that this “psychological bridge”’ itself is a legitimate structure that must take place in any such communication. Seth is at his end, I am at mine. I agree with Seth here. I don’t think it is a relatively simple matter of a medium just blacking out and acting like a telephone connection. I do think that Seth is part of another entity, and that he is something quite different from, say, a friend who has “survived” death.

“Any perception instantly alters the electromagnetic and neurological systems of the perceiver. In your terms this is what a perception is: an alteration of neurological structure. The receiving mechanisms themselves change, and are changed by that which they perceive. I am speaking here of the physical nature of any perception.