“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The other [Saturday] evening while he was in bed Ruburt had a somewhat surprising experience. He was not dreaming. His body was asleep but his consciousness was drifting. He clearly heard my voice. It seemed to come literally from out of the sky, down into another room outside of (next-door to, actually) the one in which his body slept. For a moment the power frightened him, for it sounded like a radio turned up to an incredible degree — louder than thunder. At the time words were clearly distinguishable, though later he forgot what they said. For an instant he was tempted to interpret the power as anger, for in your world when someone is shouting they are usually angry. He realized, however, that something else was involved. He did not sense my presence, but only heard the thunder of the voice. It shocked him because he is used to hearing my words from within his head — he had never before been aware of my voice as existing apart from him. In the dream state he has heard me giving him information. In these instances, however, he was the channel through which my voice came. He has often wondered about the nature of my own independence, and the kind of reality in which I exist.

Through him I am aware of the nature and condition of your world, and offer from my viewpoint comments meant to help you. Through Ruburt, then, I am permitted to view the earth “again” in your terms. I exist apart from him, as he exists apart from me, yet we are together a part of the same entity — and that simply carries the idea of the psyche further.

If an inhabitant from another reality outside of your own physical system entirely were to visit it, and if “his” intelligence was roughly of the same degree as your own, he would still have to learn to focus his consciousness in the same way that you do, more or less, in order to perceive your world. He would have to alter his native focus and turn it in a direction that was foreign to him. In this way he could “pick up your station.”¹ There would be distortions, because even though he managed such manipulations he might not have the same kind of native physical structure as your own, of course, through which to receive and interpret those data his altered consciousness perceived.

(10:34. Jane’s trance had been excellent, her delivery steady and rather quiet for the most part. “I knew what Seth was talking about,” she said, “because I had the images to go along with what he was saying. Not that I could repeat him now, word for word….”

“In our experiments, often, I will give him an impression, and he will automatically translate it into visual terms … There is sometimes at his end a last tug and pull, so that the vocal mechanism will finally speak the correct interpretation. Of course Ruburt’s own associations are used by me, up to a certain point, to lead him to the proper subject or image … When we are successful there is a divergence from his associations so that he says the correct word, even though for him personally it may be the wrong word.

There is no danger, and I will repeat this: There is no danger of dissociation grabbing a hold of him like some black, vague and furry monster, carrying him away to the netherlands of hysteria, schizophrenia, or insanity … Withdrawal into dissociation as a hiding place from the world could, of course, have dire consequences. [...]

[...] We met “Dr. Instream,” as Jane called him in The Seth Material, but once, a few weeks after I’d written him in the spring of 1965 about Jane’s growing psychic abilities. [...]

[...] 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.