The Seth Material

The Seth Material is Jane Roberts's own account of how the Seth communications began — the story of a writer and poet who had no particular metaphysical interests when, one evening in September 1963, she and her husband Robert Butts were experimenting with a Ouija board and found themselves in contact with a consciousness of startling intelligence and philosophical depth who identified himself as Seth. Roberts writes about this experience with the same combination of astonishment, scepticism, and open-minded investigation that she brought to the entire thirty-year body of work, and her honesty about her doubts and the ongoing effort to understand what was happening through her makes this book an unusually trustworthy introduction.

Beyond the narrative of how the Seth communications developed, the book presents key excerpts from the sessions that convey the essential character of Seth's teaching — his wit, his precision, his capacity for addressing both the most practical and the most cosmic dimensions of existence, and his consistent warmth toward the human beings he was working with. For readers new to the Seth material, this is the natural starting point: it grounds the extraordinary content of books like Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality in the human reality of the woman through whom they came, and invites the same quality of open-minded, critically engaged attention that Roberts herself modelled.