I have had one main source for my spiritual education and it was found in a few books by the same author. Everything else was grazing articles and books and the greatest teacher: life.

That first book was Seth Speaks. It led to more Seth books over the years, as I eased into the very thick and cerebral material. I found the books useful because they were describing things I had already thought about or experienced so they felt familiar, and prescient, too. Unlike most writings that were said to have been channelled, the Seth books never dipped into dogma, instead they stressed that the divine was within and that the individual should rely on themselves when considering spiritual principles and work. Many beliefs, he explained, were limiting. Many were based on distorted principles handed down through the generations in some cases.

As the decades rolled on, the books haven’t just held up, new experiences have revealed other teachings to have been amazingly on point, sometimes decades later.

Seth is very cerebral, and it often takes multiple read-throughs to get the full range of comprehension. I’m not a fan of trance channels, because so much of it strikes me as contrived or soaked in dogma. It isn’t to say those psychics are wrong, but their teachings appear distorted with notions being put forward that often tow the line of a consensus reality which I had often found suspect as a result of my own experience. A lot was trying to muscle its way through my awareness even then, much of which I would find mirrored in the material that Jane, as Seth, brought forward. Okay, so to be fair, Seth talks about life after life and how we create our reality, ideas that strike some people as strange, too, so there is that.

The work is worth the reflection and the level of self reliance that is inspired by the books even before the content is even considered.

Jane Roberts and her husband Robert Butts were both involved in helping to bring the Seth material forward. It began in the mid 1960’s when Jane, who was an author, decided to write a nonfiction book entitled Improving Your ESP Powers. They tried exercises throughout to determine which ones worked and which ones didn’t. At one point in their process, they used a Ouija board and Jane found that she was anticipating the answers before they came. Jane didn’t know what to think. The personality that came through was named Seth and he would say things that were complex, nuanced, and struck the two of them as curious. Were they making it all up? Then, around the same time, while sitting writing, Jane felt as though she had suddenly tumbled down a dimensional rabbit hole. Her account which is in the first chapter of The Seth Material describes it in her own words:

It was a lovely Autumn evening. After supper, I sat down at my old table in the living room, as I always do to work on my poetry, Rob was painting in the back Studio, three rooms away. I took out my pen and paper and settled down with my 9th or 10th cup of coffee for the day and my cigarettes. Willie, our cat dosed on the blue rug.

What happened Next was like a “trip” without drugs. If someone had slipped me an LSD Cube on the sly, the experience couldn’t have been more bizarre. 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 unbearable volume. Not only ideas came through this channel, but sensations, intensified and pulsating. I was tuned in, turned on– whatever you want to call it– connected to some incredible source of energy. I didn’t even have time to call out to Rob.

It was as if the physical world were really tissue paper thin, hiding infinite dimensions of reality, and I was suddenly flung through the tissue paper with a huge ripping sound. My body sat at the table, my hands furiously, scribbling down the words and ideas that flashed through my head. Yet, I seemed to be somewhere else at the same time traveling through things. I went plummeting through a leaf to find a whole universe, open up, and then out again drawn into new perspectives.

I felt as if knowledge was being implanted in the very cells of my body so that I couldn’t forget it. I got knowing a biological spirituality. It was feeling and knowing, rather than intellectual knowledge. At the same time, I remembered having a dream the night before, which I had forgotten, in which this same sort of experience had occurred and I knew that the two were connected. 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. I only know that if I begun speaking for Seth that night, I would have been terrified.

Here are a few excerpts from different books written from the mid 1960’s through to the mid 80’s.

Jane would go into trance and would dictate the books with few revisions. Robb would take dictation. Seth would cover topics that were wide ranging from the soul, the self, the psyche, the nature of reality, and topics (like probable realities) that were new at the time. Many ideas that you think of today were concepts that Seth put forward. Probable selves, timelines, and realities, were all presented first by Seth. Seth provided ways to explore the inner senses he often described, and he always accented the importance of the individual and how it must look for its own answers.

Now, decades later, I find that my experience is similar to the ones Jane has described. I found that her initial experience quoted by Jane earlier, is similar to how I experience extra sensory material: it isn’t rational or mental but is instead is felt at the atomic or cellular level. What others might feel, I can experience directly as if it was a reality to me, but often accompanied by bewilderment as to its source since the reaction lacks the cause that we are normally familiar with. Some of my experiences can be as vivid as a drug trip (I assume, never having taken LSD before). So much sounds so familiar both back then and now that it makes me certain that the material comes from a source that is more than an imaginal figment or other.

Seth is worth the purchase. The best first book is Seth Speaks. After that introduction, the rest of the material will make more sense. You can find the collection sold online.

I salute the light that is within you!

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