Leaving Your Body is Easy: Just Ask Seth
"You are hypnotized by your own limited concepts" - Seth Speaks
It’s been a minute since I last churned out something weird for you. Been busy, trying and failing to “make it work” in our pixelated hellscape of a reality. Keep reading to discover one of America’s most treasured out-of-body experiences: Seth.
Jane Roberts Channels an Ancient Personality in Upstate NY
What I had hoped to give you months ago was a piece about a special soul called Seth, channeled through a strange American woman called Jane Roberts. She conducted Seth seances in the 60s. During these events, she’d allegedly channel Seth, who would then expound on mystical topics. There was a big following, a considerable amount of hype, and multiple books written on the subject.
From what I’ve gathered scanning through Seth Speaks (1970), one of the later publications, Seth identified himself early on as an “energy personality essence,” or a personality untethered to a body. Jane’s on board, although she simply refers to him as Seth.
During their sessions, Seth utilizes Jane as a conduit to breakdown existence, religion, the structure of the universe, the interior life of human beings, spirituality, and consciousness—among other things.
However, I think to understand why Seth is making an appearance in Jane’s life, we have to understand the events of her life before he appears.
What’s Up With Jane?
Author, editor, poet, psychic, spirit medium, dude-channeling American woman: Jane is born Dorothy Jane Roberts in 1929 in upstate New York to Delmer Hubbell Roberts and Marie Burdo—who divorce when Jane is a toddler.
(My parents separated when I was that age, and I just want to say that I’ve yet to channel overt male personalities for money—but I’m considering it.)
Following the divorce, Marie takes Jane and heads back to her parents’ house, where she starts to develop painful rheumatoid arthritis. However, Marie must work constantly, and Jane and her grandfather get close in the interim.
As time goes on, everyone in the house starts to deteriorate. The grandfather, Joseph, can’t support everyone—he’s older; they’re on public assistance. Marie’s still working as much as possible and making little of herself despite. Then the grandmother dies in a car accident.
And then, the arthritis—and seemingly her mental health—becomes so bad that Marie ends up bedridden, and Jane is forced to become her nurse.
Things really start to spiral once Jane is in primary school. Grandpa Joe moves out, Jane and Marie’s mother-daughter relationship starts to resemble plant rot.
Marie makes suicidal death threats to Jane, and attempts suicide at various points in time—often in front of her daughter. Marie blames Jane for their plight, talks down to her, verbally abuses her, etc...
(Ah, the classic tactical parent error—blaming the problem that they created for being a problem!)
By the time she’s 10, Jane’s coping via anxiety-induced colitis and an unshakeable aversion to interpersonal dependence. By her teens, it’s clear she’s blind as a bat—visible via her majorly thick glasses—is working with an overactive thyroid gland, and eventually succumbs to an intense urge to flee her environment.
She relocates to a catholic orphanage. In place of a home she starts creating a gorilla-glue bond with bulletproof “cultural beliefs of religion…to make up for the lack of a loving, nurturing family,”—that’s from Wikipedia.
Then her grandad dies. At the tender age of 19, his death sends her to a special place where she unnecessarily substitutes science for religion.
Jane grows up—gets a boyfriend, Walt. They go on a cross-country roadtrip. They marry. She works as a newspaper editor. One night, she and Walt are "cutting up, dancing, and raisin' hell at a party," when she sees, for the first time, Robert Fabian Butts, Jr. Once she gets the Butts, she can’t get enough.
Seth Finally Speaks
In the end, this Butts, Jr. becomes her husband and coauthor of the Seth franchise. They move to New York state, it’s the 60s now, and they’re in their 30s.
Supposedly, it’s around this time that Jane’s trying to write poetry one night when Seth rolls through her mind like a bowling ball for the first time. She describes it as a wild flood of ideas and feelings that were not her own:
“One evening in September 1963, as I sat writing poetry. Suddenly my consciousness left my body, and my mind was barraged by ideas that were astonishing and new to me at that time. On return to my body, I discovered that my hands had produced an automatic script, explaining many of the concepts that I’d been given” (9).
This prompts all sorts of psychic research and exploration on her part. She and her husband start experimenting with ouija boards…spelling out S-E-T-H.
Jane takes it for granted that it’s her subconscious talking, not a demon, dibbuk, or a djinn—which would be my first guess.
Soon after all this ouija foreplay runs its course there’s a Sethgasm, and she starts channeling him in trance states, and he begins to speak through her more clearly, explicitly hitting the following topics:
The nature of physical matter
Time
Reality
The God concept
Probable universes
Health
Reincarnation
Meanwhile, they’re writing all this down—specifically, the husband, Rob, is writing and Jane/Seth dictates. A readership/audience develops. Consumers of the Seth product start getting into contact, requesting the homie Seth’s guidance. They hope his inner eye will scan their lives, break down their confusion, their questions. The Butts start holding sessions in their home. Jane channels, Rob takes notes, and the audience gets their mind blown.
The star of the show isn’t exactly Seth or Jane: it’s more abstract than that. It’s the performance. Jane changes. Her voice changes. She has different, light accents while speaking. Her mannerisms change. Her husband even seems to point out that her facial structure distorts at times.
Seth refers to Jane as Ruburt when he’s talking, and he insists that he’s not a physical being, and that neither are we—in fact most of us are thrice reincarnated from beings that lived on a different planet with their own ideas of religion in the same universe as us “before” us, but they imploded as a result of errors. For this reason, Jane was just as much Jane as she once was someone called Ruburt.
Performative or genuine, Seth’s existence suggests that “human personality is multidimensional, that we exist in many realities at once, that the soul or inner self is not something apart from us, but the very medium in which we exist”.
Is There Anything To Suggest Seth Actually Exists?
What interested me about the Seth phenomenon wasn’t proving the existence of untethered personalities or other dimensions. It was the synthesis of several different theories of the universe that this Seth character mentions throughout his many appearances.
To refer back to my assertion: to understand why Seth is making an appearance in Jane’s life, we have to understand the events of her life before he appears.
What makes us search for answers—for meaning? I think it’s the gap in the justification of our own experience. You look for what you don’t have: an explanation, a pattern with a cause, a paved psychological path to rationalization. I was born into X, experienced Y, and arrived at Z because of X and Y. This type of equation is what so many traumatized people seek: a justification for the suicidal mother, the financial hardship, the bitter disappointment of religion and science when neither do anything to quell pain. We want it so badly that we’ll project it.
But what if projections are real?
Perhaps Seth is a justification for the heartbreak Jane experienced or maybe he’s real. The possibility of his validity, for me, is slim, but arguable if we examine the ideas he posits about the universe, two of which are supported scientific conversations: the Braneworld and Hologram theories.
What’s Braneworld and What Does Seth Say About It?
Braneworld poses the idea that there are various inhabited universes and dimensions, but operating from the type of bodies we have, within the specific physical laws that rule them, we can’t perceive of these other worlds. There’s a leading scientist, Randall, and he says the following about the Braneworld theory:
“because we are imprisoned in our three dimensions we can’t directly detect…other universes…It’s rather like a whole lot of bugs crawling around on a big, two-dimensional sheet of paper, who would be unaware of another set of bugs that might be crawling around on another sheet of paper that could be only a short distance away in the third dimension.”
The theory seems to date to the late 90s. However, Seth mentions potential aspects of this theory in the 70s:
“My readers may suppose that they are physical creatures, bound within physical bodies, imprisoned within bone, flesh, and skin. If you believe that your existence is dependent upon this corporeal image, then you feel in danger of extinction, for no physical form lasts, and no body, however beautiful in youth, retains the same vigor and enchantment in old age. If you identify with your own youth, or beauty, or intellect, or accomplishments, then there is the constant gnawing knowledge that these attributes can and will vanish…Basically you are no more of a physical being than I am, and I have donned and discarded more bodies than I care to tell.” (30)
He goes on to confirm that “consciousness creates form. It is not the other way around” (31). He explains that we’re all too busy to realize there’s a part of each of us that knows it is capable of so much more than the laws of gravity and organic matter forbid. He calls this part of us the intuitive self. It’s the part of us that senses danger in the future, wills to make art, or dream up what doesn’t yet exist until it does.
Essentially, Seth doesn’t create the Braneworld theory, he just affirms that most people are operating on 2-dimensional software before the idea is verbalized in the scientific community.
What’s the Hologram Theory of the Universe and What Does Seth Say About it?
There was some sound reason in the 80s to believe that everything we experience in waking life is a pre-made, programmed projection. Firstly, there was a discovery in 1982 (led by one Alain Aspect) that made waves in the minds of astrophysicists:
“objective reality does not exist…The researchers discovered that, under certain conditions, subatomic particles (such as electrons) are able to instantaneously communicate with one another regardless of the distance separating them. Whether they were separated by just a few feet or billions of miles, the particles always seemed to know what the other was doing.”
In relation to this finding, Seth makes an uncanny insight roughly 20 years prior about his connection to Jane: “we have established what I refer to as a psychological bridge between us”. He explains that it’s not like a telephone connection—rather there’s a “psychological extension, a projection of characteristics on both of our parts, and I use this for our communications” (31).
This idea of projection and an apparent interstellar psychological hotline isn’t too far-fetched. Scientists concluded this after discovering something that I don’t understand called quantum noise, which relates to the Hologram theory, and pointed experts to the following idea:
“There must be a fundamental limit to spacetime where the smoothness of the spacetime continuum begins to break down into "grains," similar to pixels that comprise images on a computer screen.”
Later, in some guy named Hogan’s mind, “the discovery of this quantum noise suggests that the entirety of the universe is merely the three-dimensional projection of information found on a two-dimensional information structure (you can liken it to a CD). This structure is located at the very "edge" of the universe, and the projection occurs when light bounces off from the structure and scatters throughout the universe.”
It’s a leaping conjecture to say that Seth anticipates these findings, but one can see the loose lexical connection to some of these concepts.
Can We Leave Our Bodies—Can We Manifest Thoughts?
I haven’t found a safe round-trip method of doing so—but Insidious the Red Door is out in theaters.
My intention, and perhaps it’s helpful for you to know it, is that you read this and entertain the idea that you are capable of more than you think is humanly possible. My intention in doing so is not to help you get ahead—intention is rarely motivated by anything other than self-interest—rather that your awakening somehow leads me to mine.
This is something I think someone in the room should have asked Seth when he manifested out of Jane: what does it serve you to tell us all this? I’ll leave you with a passage that Seth directs to his readers:
“You have been given perhaps the most awesome gift of all: the ability to project your thoughts outward into physical form” (34).
If you ask me, Seth, and the other personalities like him, somehow benefit from this projection-power, if and when they’re able to slip into our thoughts.
Overall, I think any of said personalities would agree that you could probably slip in and out of whatever you please if you found the correct psychological wave to ride.
*All images are used for educational purposes
**All Seth quotes are extracted from Seth Speaks (A Seth Book): The Eternal Validity of the Soul (April 2012, Amber-Allen Publishing e-book version on Google Play)