“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We are dealing here with something rather unusual (the tests), in that we are attempting to permit two personalities to exist side by side, so to speak. Ruburt is not in a deep trance state. I do not supersede his own personality. He allows me, in our sessions, to coexist with himself.

(The Seth Two phenomenon began to manifest itself through Jane in the 406th session for April 22, 1968. Seth Two exists in relation to Seth in somewhat the same manner that Seth does to Jane, although that analogy shouldn’t be carried very far. Even though deep connections endure among the three, then, at the same time, as I wrote early in this study, Seth Two is too far “away” from Jane [and the subject matter of this appendix] to go into here. See Note 1.

(Later in Chapter 20 of The Seth Material, Jane quoted Seth from the 463rd session for February 3, 1969. While discussing the impossibility of any medium being an absolutely clear channel for paranormal knowledge, even when “in a trance as deep as the Atlantic Ocean,” Seth had some extremely interesting things to say about the nature of perception in general. Presenting a few sentences from that session here serves two purposes: I can remind the reader of important material, and in Note 24 I can offer some unpublished extensions of it from the next session.)

(I should note that Jane’s own use of that first inner sense, demonstrated in the example she gives in Chapter 19, reflects a very strong facet of her psychic ability that she seldom indulges. Her reluctance here is closely connected to her deep feelings about personal privacy.)

By then I’d lost many months from my job as a commercial artist, which was work I’d returned to several years earlier to help ease our financial pressures. I was 44 years old — and, as I recognized after the sessions began, at a point in life where I greatly needed more penetrating insights into the meaning of existence. So did Jane, even though she was almost 10 years younger. As the sessions became part of our joint reality, we gradually came to understand that the illness I struggled with was a disguised expression of rebellion for both of us. We were very dissatisfied with our status quo: After years of work, Jane had managed to publish but a few poems and a few pieces of science fantasy (several short stories and two brief novels), and in my own view I wasn’t making it as the kind of artist I wanted to be. We were driven to know more — about art, about writing, about the human condition, about everything. My own need, as well as Jane’s, struck deep responses within her psyche.