“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Now, as to my availability at your sessions, you are able, within the conditions we have set, and with my assistance, to call upon the elements of my personality with which you are acquainted. Sort of a vitalized fourth-dimensional letter or communication, in which, if you’ll forgive the term, the medium is the message.

“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.”

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.

“The book would involve a study of mediumship, not from the viewpoint of the medium, but from the viewpoint of the personality for whom she speaks. It would involve an examination of your system of reality as it appears to me. …

“I would make clear the nature and conditions in which I now have my existence, and explain some of the reasons for the often contradictory statements made concerning life after death—statements received by various mediums in which quite different pictures of afterlife reality are received.

“Now whether or not a medium is in a trance that is as deep as the Atlantic Ocean, the medium will not be a pure channel. The ego simply will be bypassed, but the other layers of the self, and the neurological structures particularly, will continue to operate as always. They will be altered by the perceptions that pass through them.”

“Information can rarely flow like crystal-clear water, with the medium [as] a faucet to be turned off and on at will. It must be sifted through the layers of the medium’s personality. The nervous system reacts to the data even as it translates it. Nothing is neutral in those terms. The information is received and translated, as it must be, into mechanisms which the nervous system can handle and interpret. Like any perception, the information then becomes a part of the nervous system’s structure. It cannot be otherwise.