The Seth Speaker

The Arrival of Seth

Just how did Jane Roberts discover the spirit entity who called himself Seth?

In the fall of 1963, Jane was early in her career as a fiction writer, and had just had her first novel published. She and her artist husband Robert were living in a rented house in Elmira, New York. Jane was about to embark on a journey that would change their lives dramatically and will eventually change the course of the world as well.

The following is excerpted from one of her first and most important books: The Seth Material:

“To My knowledge I’d never had a psychic experience in my life, and I didn’t know anyone who had. Nothing in my background prepared me for the astonishing evening of September 9, 1963, yet it was this event, I’m sure, that initiated the sessions and my introduction to Seth.”

As she often did Jane sat down after supper to work on her poetry.

“What happened next was like a ‘trip’ without drugs. ... Between one normal minute and the next, a fantastic avalanche of radical, new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force, as if my skull were some sort of receiving station, turned up to an unbearable volume. ... I was tuned in, turned on—whatever you want to call it—connected to some incredible source of energy.”

“My body sat at the table, my hands furiously scribbling down the words and ideas that flashed through my head.”

“When I came to, I found myself scrawling what was obviously meant as the title of that odd batch of notes: The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. Later, the Seth Material would develop those ideas, but I didn’t know that at the time. In one of the early sessions, Seth said that this had been his first attempt to contact me.”

“Here are a few quotes from that manuscript.
‘We are individualized portions of energy, materialized within physical existence, to learn to form ideas from energy, and make them physical (this is idea construction). We project ideas into an object, so that we can deal with it. But the object is the thought, materialized. ... We learn by viewing our own creations, in other words. We learn the power and effects of ideas by changing them into physical realities; and we learn responsibility in the use of creative energy....’

‘The entity is the basic self, immortal, nonphysical. It communicates on an energy level with other entities, and has an almost inexhaustible supply of energy at its command. The individual is the portion of the whole self that we manage to express physically... .’ ”

Following that experience, Jane and Rob decided to try using a Ouija board borrowed from their landlady’s attic. It took three tries before the pointer began to move. The first messages were interesting but not dramatic. But then, on December 8, 1963, the playful personality of Seth began to reveal himself. Again, excerpts from The Seth Material:

“ ‘Do you have a message for us?’ Rob asked.”
“CONSCIOUSNESS IS LIKE A FLOWER WITH MANY PETALS, replied the pointer.”

“ ‘What do you think of your various reincarnations?’ ”
“THEY ARE WHAT I AM, BUT I WILL BE MORE. PUN: THE WHOLE IS MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS HEARTS.”

“ ‘Is all of this Jane’s subconscious talking?’ Rob asked.”
“SUBCONSCIOUS IS A CORRIDOR. WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE WHICH DOOR YOU TRAVEL THROUGH?”

When asked what name he would like to be called, the Ouija board spelled out a cryptic response:
“TO GOD, ALL NAMES ARE HIS NAME.”
“ ‘But we still need a name some kind of name to use in talking to you,’ Rob said.”
“YOU MAY CALL ME WHATEVER YOU CHOOSE. I CALL MYSELF SETH. IT FITS THE ME OF ME, THE PERSONALITY MORE CLEARLY APPROXIMATING THE WHOLE SELF I AM, OR TRYING TO BE.”

Within a few sessions, Jane made a unnerving discovery. She began to hear the answers in her head before the pointer spelled them out on the board. The date was December 15, 1963:

“At the next session–our fourth with Seth—I heard the words in my head at a faster and faster rate, and not only sentences but whole paragraphs before they were spelled out.

“And without really knowing how or why, I opened up my mouth and let them (words) out. For the first time I began to speak of Seth continuing the sentences the board had spelled out only a moment before.”

posted by Seeker @ 4:30 PM