The Speakers...

Throughout Man's history there have been Speakers; Energy Gestalts of Conciousness sent to earth in various forms to interact with Man and remind us of who we truly are. Many of these Energy Personalities have been "Channelled" through humans. Seth is one such channeled personality, and is likely the same energy gestalt that includes Abraham through Esther Hicks, Guy Ballard and St. Germain, Edgar Cayce and others in our contemporary era.

In September of 2009, I became acquainted with Abraham of Abraham-Hicks. They were my first, and still my favorite “living” spiritual teacher. In one of my earliest meditations, I asked as my intention how I could become better acquainted with my Greater Being.

The answer came through loud and clear; "READ THE SETH BOOKS!" There was no question what I heard, and Seth was not even on my radar at the time.

Well, only a short 8 months later, and I have read all eight "Seth" Books, As well as "The Magical Approach", and have just started on "The Seth Material". I can say unequivocally that these books are a blueprint to the consciousness. They have answered all the questions I had about my life, my purpose, and the greater questions about our mass existence. Jane Roberts and Robert Butts, normal average people that they were, became a vehicle for the painstakingly accurate dissertation of what is widely known as "The Seth Books", culminating in eight "official" Seth Books, with various other ones gleaned from their over 20 years of sessions, including Early Sessions, Audio Sessions from Jane's ESP Classes, and more. If you want to know the nature of ourselves and our reality, if you are ready for it, if you can "hear" it, Seth is the Cadillac of Spiritual Teachers, and these texts are truly the Blueprint to our consciousness.

These texts were painstakingly dictated and journaled with extraordinary care by an Energy Personality Essence (as Seth refers to himself), spoken through a woman in trance, with no background in metaphysical matters, to her husband, an artist, also with no metaphysical background, who recorded the “sessions” in great detail, with Seth dictating not only the content, but even the punctuation and layout. These books do indeed form the framework for our existence, before our birth, in this life and after our death. The beginning and end are only in our terms – we consider birth the beginning, and death the end, but no such points exist in reality. Our personality was, is, and always will be. This body is a vehicle that we use while we are alive, though we are not bound to it. Our body even has its own consciousness that holds down the fort, as it were, while our personality conscious often leaves the body in the form of dreams, or other out-of-body experiences.

Many are finding that the old answers do not fit with the new questions. I have found that many people resonate with this material because their inner being knows truth when it hears it. That means that people from every background can find meaning in these teachings. I find nothing in it to be exclusive, but rather, inclusive of the whole human race. And therefore, our members, also come from varying backgrounds.

This group is about knowing our Greater Being, understanding the perfection that is our world, recognizing that the Universe is poised in our favor, just waiting to bend over backwards to give us that which we want. We create our own reality – we project our world outward from ourselves. We are, to borrow Abe’s phrase, Magnificent Genius Creators. We came here to grow, develop, and expand our personality and consciousness. There is no beginning, there is no end.

However, there is an end to this introduction. If you want more, you will need to come to the classes, or study group, as you wish. If you are unfamiliar with Seth, and wish to attend the classes, I suggest you start with Seth Speaks, and then read through the eight books that make up the dictated Seth Books, in order. Each builds upon the last, so the order is somewhat important. You may also want to start before Seth Speaks with The Seth Material for more of an overview of the Seth phenomenon and Jane Robert’s viewpoint of it. That may be helpful if you are having trouble with the idea that Seth is an Energy Personality Essence who is channeled through a human (Jane Roberts) while in trance. Jane talks about it in great detail, and even her trouble with acceptance of her own experience. I posted the Author’s Introduction from that Book further down this page for your benefit. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. It is my Joy to share this knowledge with the world, and bring it to those who can hear it. We hope to see you in the next class.

Finest Regards,

Phil

The Seth Material – Authors Introduction by Jane Roberts

It was February 29, 1968. I was holding one of my twice weekly ESP classes. The large bay window was open, letting in the unusually warm night air. The lights were normally lit in my living room where classes are held. I felt that we had a visitor. As always I went into trance easily, without preamble.

This class was composed of college girls. They had read my first book, knew about Seth, and had attended a few classes, but they had never witnessed a Seth session. My eyes closed. When they opened a few moments later, they were much darker. I began to speak for Seth. He had thrown my glasses to the floor in a quick characteristic gesture, yet now I scrutinized each student with sharp, clear focus. The voice that spoke was deep, quite loud, and more masculine than feminine.

We were having a spontaneous Seth session. It served to introduce the students to Seth, and I will let a few excerpts from it serve the same purpose now, introducing Seth to those readers who have not heard of him:

“According to what you have been taught, you are composed of physical matter and cannot escape it, and this is not so. The physical matter will disintegrate, but you will not. Though you cannot find me, know that I am here. Your own parents seem to disappear before your eyes and vanish into nothingness forever. I can assure you that they will continue to live. I can assure you that death is another beginning, and that when you are dead, you are not silenced. For is this voice that you hear now, silence? Is this presence that you sense within this room, death?

“I am here to tell you that your joy is not dependent upon your youth, for I am hardly young. I am here to tell you that your joy is not dependent upon your physical body, for in your terms I have none. I have what I have always had, the identity that is mine. It is never diminished. It grows and develops.

“You are what you are, and you will be more. Do not be afraid of change, for you are change, and you change as you sit before me. All action is change, for otherwise, there would be a static universe, and then indeed death would be the end. What I am is also what you are: individualized consciousness.

“Change with the seasons, for you are more than the seasons. You form the seasons. They are the reflection of your inner psychic climate. I came for one purpose this evening: so that you could sense my vitality, and sensing it, know that I speak to you from dimensions beyond those with which you are acquainted. The grave is not the end, for such a noisy one as I never spoke with the lips of death.

“I am in this room, although there is no object within which you can place me. You are as disembodied as I. You have a vehicle to use, a body that you call your own, and that is all. I borrow Ruburt’s [Seth’s name for me; in addition, Seth always speaks of me as male] with his consent, but what I am is not dependent upon atoms and molecules and what you are is not dependent upon physical matter. You have lived before and will live again, and when you are done with physical existence, you will still live.

“I come here as though I appeared through a hole in space and time. There are walks in space and time through which you can travel, and in dreams you have been where I am. I want you to feel your own vitality. Feel it travel through the universe and know that it is not dependent upon your physical image. In reality, you project your own energy out to form the physical world. Therefore, to change your world, it is yourself you must change. You must change what you project.

“You always were and you always will be. This is the meaning of existence and joy. The god that is, is within you, for you are a part of all that is”

Seth spoke through me for over two hours, so quickly that the students had trouble taking notes. His joy and vitality were obvious. The personality was not mine. Seth’s dry, sardonic humor shone from my eyes. The muscles of my face rearranged themselves into different patterns. My normally feminine gestures were replaced by his. Seth was enjoying himself in the guise of an old man, shrewd, lively, quite human. When he spoke of the joy of existence, ringing even through such a voice as his, that deep voice boomed. Later one of the students, Carol, told me that although she knew the words were coming from my mouth, still she felt that they were coming from all over, from the walls themselves.

During a break, Carol read the notes that she had taken. Suddenly, without transition, I was Seth again, leaning forward, joking:

“If you are to be my stenographer, you must do better than that. You are a mad scribbler.”

Then a give-and-take period began in which Seth corrected Carol’s notes as she read them, added several remarks to clear certain sentences, and bantered back and forth with her. The students asked questions, and Seth answered them.

This was a very simple session. Seth addressed himself to the students for the first time, yet he touched upon several issues that appear often in the Seth Material: The personality is multidimensional. The individual is basically free of space and time. The fate of each of us is in our own hands. Problems not faced in this life will be faced in another. We cannot blame God, society, or our parents for misfortunes, since before this physical life we chose the circumstances into which we would be born and the challenges that could best bring about our development. We form physical matter as effortlessly and unselfconsciously as we breathe. Telepathically, we are all aware of the mass ideas from which we form our overall conception of physical reality.

As of December, 1969, my husband, Rob, and I have held over 500 Seth sessions, over a period of five years. My first book in this field, “How to Develop Your ESP Power”, briefly explained the circumstances leading to my interest in ESP, and the experiments that led to my introduction to Seth. Since then, Seth has demonstrated telepathic and clairvoyant abilities on occasions too frequent to mention. Through sessions he has helped friends, strangers, and students, and by following his instructions my husband and I are learning to develop our own psychic potentials.

Yet, I was not a “born psychic” with a background of paranormal experience. Neither Rob nor I had any knowledge of such matters. Even after my first enthusiasm, I didn’t accept these developments without serious self-questioning and intellectual analysis. I wanted to keep my experiences on as scientific a basis as possible.

“Yes” I said in effect. “I do speak in trance for a personality who claims to have survived death. Yes, Seth does insist that reincarnation is a fact. But… but… but.” I found the ideas presented in the Seth Material fascinating, but I was not about to accept them as the same kind of solid fact with which I accepted, say, the bacon I eat for breakfast. Now I know they are far more important.

To me, it was tantamount to intellectual suicide to even admit the possibility that Seth actually was a personality who had survived death. Nowhere in my first book did I say that I thought Seth was exactly what he said he was: “an energy personality essence no longer focused in physical reality.” Instead I studied the various explanations for such personalities given by psychologists and parapsychologists on the one hand, and by spiritualists on the other. Nowhere did I find an explanation as logical and consistent as that given in the Seth Material itself.

I was so used to thinking of myself as a physical creature, bound to space and time, that I almost refused to accept the evidence of my own experience. While involved in the most intuitive work in the world, I tried to become more and more objective. I tried to step back into a world I had really left forever – a universe in which nothing existed except in physical terms, a world in which communications from any other realities or dimensions were impossible. Yet, we continued to have Seth sessions twice a week.

I began to have out-of-body experiences (astral projections) as I sat in the living room, speaking for Seth. Seth described what I saw while my own consciousness was miles away, perceiving locations and events in another town or state. Our files contain statements from two brothers in California, for example, asserting that Seth correctly described their home and neighborhood while I spoke for him in Elmira, New York, some three thousand miles away. I could hardly deny those facts.

Following publication of my earlier book, letters came from strangers asking for help and advice. Finally, I agreed to hold a few sessions for those most in need, though the responsibility frightened me. The people involved didn’t attend the sessions since they lived in other parts of the country, yet they said the advice helped them; information given concerning individual backgrounds was correct. Seth often explained problems as the result of unresolved stresses in past reincarnational lives, and gave specific advice as to how the individuals could use their abilities now to meet these challenges.

Before this I had suspected that the reincarnational data was a delightful dish of fantasy cooked up by my own subconscious. When all this began, in fact, I wasn’t at all sure that we survived death once, much less over and over again.

Rob and I were hardly religious in conventional terms. We haven’t been to a church in years, except to attend weddings or funerals. I was brought up a Catholic, but as I grew older I found it more and more difficult to accept the God of my ancestors. Irony whispered that He was as dead as they were. The heaven that had sustained me as a child seemed in my teens to be a shallow mockery of meaningful existence. Who wanted to sit around singing hymns to a father-God, even if he did exist, and what sort of intelligent God would require such constant adoration? A very insecure, appallingly human kind of God indeed.

The alternative, that of hellfire, was equally unbelievable. Yet the conventional God of our fathers apparently sat without a qualm with the blessed in heaven, while the devil tortured the rest of the unlucky dead. That God, I decided, was out. I would not tolerate Him as a friend. For that matter He didn’t treat His son too well either, as the story goes. But Christ you could at least respect, I thought. He’d been here; he knew how it was.

Before I was twenty, then, I’d left behind that archaic God, the Virgin, and the communion of saints. Heaven and hell, angels and devils, were dismissed. This particular group of chemicals and atoms I called “me” would fall into no such traps – at least none that I could recognize.

Rob’s background was different. His parents’ brand of religion was a sort of social Protestantism, rather delightfully innocent of dogma. In general, God loved little boys and girls with starched shirts, acceptable addresses, polished shoes, and fathers who made good money – it also helped if their mothers baked cookies for the PTA.

Neither of us was bitter about such a God’s apparent injustices – we didn’t pay Him that much attention. I had my poetry; Rob, who is an artist, had his painting. Each of us felt a strong sense of contact with nature. No one was more surprised than I was, then, to find myself quite abruptly speaking for someone who was supposed to have survived death. I berated myself at times, thinking that even my Irish grandmother would have found spirits in the living room rather hard to take – and I used to think she was superstitious! A surviving soul seemed part and parcel of the adults’ nonsense I’d thought I’d escaped, thanks to a college education, a quick mind, and a fine dose of native rebelliousness. It took me a while to discover that I was being as prejudiced against the idea of survival as some others were for it. Now I realize that while I was priding myself on my openmindedness, my mental flexibility extended only to ideas that fit in with my own preconceptions. Now I know that human personality has a far greater reality than we are usually prepared to give it.  Someone has produced over fifty notebooks of fascinating material, and even at my most skeptical moments I have to accept the reality of the sessions and the material. The scope, quality, and theories of the material “hooked” us almost at once.

Rob and I are both convinced that the Seth Material springs from sources beyond my self, and that it is much less distorted by pat, conventionalized symbolism than are other paranormal scripts we have encountered. Seth says this material has been given by himself and others in other times and places, but that it is given again, in new ways, for each succeeding generation through the centuries. The reader will have to make his own judgments, but personally I do accept his theories as valid and significant.

Moreover, the riddle of such personalities as Seth – call it “spirit possession,” a “daemon” (as Socrates did) – has concerned mankind through the ages. The phenomenon is hardly new. Through telling my own story and presenting the material, I hope to throw some light upon the nature of such experiences and to show that human personality has abilities still to be tapped, and other ways to receive knowledge than those it usually employs.

The Seth Material has completely changed my ideas of the nature of reality, and reinforced my sense of identity. No longer do I feel as I did before, that man is the slave of time, illness decay, and at the mercy of built-in destructive tendencies over which he has no control. I feel in control of my own destiny as never before, and no longer ruled by patterns subconsciously set during my childhood.

I don’t mean to imply that I feel myself entirely released from every worry and fear, only that I now know we do have the freedom to change ourselves and our environment, and that in a very basic manner, we ourselves form the environment to which we then react. I believe that we form our own reality – now, and after death.

The purpose of this book is to introduce you to Seth and the Seth Material. Though Seth has appeared only once in a physical materialization, Rob has seen him clearly enough to paint a portrait of him that hangs in our living room (see the illustrated section). Through me, Seth has produced a continuing manuscript that runs well over five thousand double-spaced typewritten pages, in not quite five years’ time. I know many “living” persons who haven’t produced that much in a lifetime. Yet my own work continues: since the sessions began, I’ve written two books of nonfiction (not counting this one), two of poetry, and a dozen short stories. Seth certainly hasn’t “stolen” any my own creative energy for his own purposes.

The first chapters of this book will deal with the emergence of Seth’s personality and the impact he had on our lives as we tried to understand what was happening. Out of nowhere it seemed, I found myself having experiences that I considered nearly impossible. Never in our lives had we found ourselves so caught between curiosity and caution, so fascinated and baffled.

Excerpts from some of the early sessions will also be included in the first chapters, since Seth’s ideas were then as new and strange to us as the sessions themselves. But the main emphasis will be on the story itself, from the first Ouija board experiment through the first instance when I startled Rob and myself by speaking for Seth; and the changes in our attitudes as further developments occurred. I’ll also include examples of Seth’s clairvoyant abilities.

The bulk of this book will deal with Seth’s ideas on various subjects, such as life after death, reincarnation, health, the nature of physical reality, the God concept, dreams, time, identity, and perception. I’m sure that these excerpts from the material itself and some sample reincarnational readings will give most readers greater insights into their own personalities and the situations in which they find themselves. I hope that Seth’s theories on health will benefit all my readers, and that the material on personality will help each discover for himself the multidimensional reality that is his heritage.

The philosophical and psychological implications of  mediumship and ESP phenomena and the possible origins of the Seth Material, along with several questions concerning Seth’s independent reality, will be considered. I’ll also give Seth’s advice as to the development of psychic abilities.

Someone who was familiar with psychic literature and paranormal experiences would have been better prepared for these events than I was, but I would not have missed them for the world.