“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(From the 33rd session for March 9, 1964:) I do not bring about the trance state in the manner of which you [Joseph] are speaking. Ruburt switches on another channel, through which my essence can enter more readily. This certainly does involve a looking inward on his part, but it is not self-hypnosis in usual terms — merely a focusing upon an objective inner stimulus … Any such signs (as the powerful, deeper Seth voice) involve camouflage patterns, and do not actually represent direct experience. This is not my voice, for example. It is a representation or approximation of my voice for your edification. Furthermore, in your terms I do not have a voice. But it is a valid representation, and if I say so myself — that’s a pun — the voice is much like the one I would use….

(From the 242nd session for March 16, 1966:) The ego is not the most powerful or the most knowledgeable portion of the self. It is simply a well-specialized part of the personality, fully equipped to operate under certain circumstances²¹ … When those conditions no longer exist [after “death”], then other layers of the self take over the dominant position, and the personality realigns its psychological components. The ego does not disappear, however; it merely takes a back seat in some respects, as your own subconscious does during physical existence. The ego is under the control of what may loosely be called “the inner self.” The survival or nonphysical personality has somewhat the same relationship to the ego as the dreaming personality has to it in physical life.

(From the 398th session for March 11, 1968:) Personalities are not static things. Entities are eternal. They are not as nicely nor as neatly packaged out, one to a body, as your psychologists believe. They constantly change. They grow. They make decisions. They use the physical body fully, or they partially depart according to their own inner needs and development.

(In the opening notes for the 708th session, in this Volume 2, I wrote that Jane finished Adventures in August 1974. She’d started it in July 1971 [as noted a few paragraphs ago], but there was never any straight line of activity for her on the book from beginning to end. She finished Seth Speaks. Then during a class in November 1971, she first gave voice to her trance language, Sumari; so besides the other class material she had several more stages of consciousness — if very dependable ones — to deal with in Adventures. At the same time she worked on her autobiography, From This Rich Bed [which still isn’t done]. At times the creative pace grew even more complicated: From March to July 1972, she put Adventures aside completely to write her novel, The Education of Oversoul Seven, when that idea spontaneously came to her. But overall, Jane discovered that she was frustrated in dealing with class experiments and records for Adventures while she still had so much to learn about her own connections with Seth. More than ever, she needed larger concepts of reality to explain her experiences, those of her students, and of some who wrote.

(The 768th session was held on March 22, 1976, 11 months after Seth had finished dictating “Unknown” Reality. Originally Jane and I deleted the following rather personal material from the session — yet we present it here because in it Seth explores further the connections involving the three of us. My notes at the time show that I was also distinctly surprised by Seth’s comments on his emotional behavior at his own “level of activity,” but I soon understood my reaction as a sign that we still had things to learn about him, as well as ourselves. In one passage Seth referred to some health difficulties, now resolved, that had bothered me just before our sessions with him began.

(Jane stopped holding ESP class on a regular basis early in 1975; the rhythm of those weekly gatherings was broken when we gave up apartment living to move into our own house in March of that year. In spite of our good intentions class in the old sense was never resumed, as we became more and more involved with producing Seth’s and Jane’s books, painting, correspondence, and all of the other events that make up our daily lives. The following material came through during a session on March 11, 1977, when a group of former students assembled to hear Seth speak ‘for old time’s sake’:)

(Finally, I’ll close this appendix with a couple of quotations from Seth that I return to again and again. [These in turn lead to a last note.] In Chapter 3 of Seth Speaks, see the 519th session for March 23, 1970:) When I enter your system, I move through a series of mental and psychic events. You would interpret these events as space and time, and so often I must use the terms, for I must use your language rather than my own … In one way, I translate what I am into an event that you can understand to some extent.³⁸

23. The 241st session, mentioned in Note 22, is one of those we hope to publish in full, for in it Seth discussed how the psychological bridge helps Jane “translate” his telepathic material. The information came through in connection with our envelope tests and those for Dr. Instream, both sets of which were in mid-course then, in March 1966. (See the account of Jane’s “year of testing” and the excerpts from sessions 179–80.)