Jane Roberts and Rob Butts were born, raised, educated and married in the state of New York.
By the time 1960 rolled around, they were settled in a big, drafty apartment in the little town of Elmira, facing
the necessity of earning their daily bread and staunchly determined to spend satisfying hunks of time on their
individual modes of creativity: painting for Rob, the writing of poetry for Jane. It wasn’t the first
time (nor will it be the last) that a combination of playfulness, curiosity and a Ouija Board carved a wider life
path for an individual than he or she ever imagined, but it is never a mundane experience, no matter how many
times it is repeated. Some evening during the year of 1963, Jane and Rob sat facing one another with
the board perched across their knees and began to explore. Tenacity and perhaps an assuredness that came from
somewhere other than their rational minds sustained them during the unproductive first sessions, when
most of the rest of us would have wandered off to some occupation more instantly gratifying. It wasn’t long
before someone or something came through, calling himself Frank Withers. But this personality’s participation
was brief: He had served to open a door of consciousness in Jane that allowed the personality essence
of someone else to come through, the I-don’t-care-what-you-call-me-oh- call-me-Seth entity. A friendly-humored,
playful spirit, Seth was neither dictator nor doomsayer. But the wisdom he communicated over the next twenty years
was so flawless, so common-sense and yet revolutionary, that it would fill numerous volumes, transform
the lives of thousands of people, and come, finally, to reside in the archives of Yale University. Soon after
the introduction of Seth into the lives of Jane and Rob, Jane found that she could allow her own personality to
withdraw to the background while Seth "borrowed" her voice, and the Ouija Board was put aside. Rob became the
faithful secretary, hand-recording the dictation of all the material, as Seth poured forth book after
book. He became a "member" of Jane’s regular ESP class, appeared on television and the radio, allowed himself
to be subjected to verification testing by conventional scientists, and chatted with Richard Bach, who
visited Jane and Rob not long after publishing Johnathon Livingston Seagull. Seth refused to be exalted as any sort of
messiah or father figure, and time after time he would challenge a participant to examine his own consciousness
and beliefs for the answers - insisting that all the answers lay within each individual."If you will forgive my
terminology - Blessed are those who have humor! And that is the end of this profound message," he might quip, reminding his
listeners to neither take him nor themselves too seriously. But he would also reveal information that
was so unlike our conventional beliefs, but so concisely, complexly logical, that his material has attracted physicists
and scientists the world over to study. Seth had said to the students once, in an ESP class, "You are as dead
now as you will ever be." With that in mind, Jane Roberts chose at the age of 53, in September of
1984, to allow the complications of rheumatoid arthritis to be the vehicle that released her to other levels of
consciousness, leaving this physical reality. During her lifetime, she created a legacy of her own, with books
of poetry with novels for children and adults, and some of those volumes are currently being reprinted, along with most of
the Seth books. Rob still lives in Elmira, and he has undertaken the daunting task of organizing into books some of the
thousands of pages of the Seth Material that have never seen a printing press (but which are readily available for reading
in the Yale archives.) He has published The Magical Approach, and The Way Toward Health, by Jane Roberts and Seth,
and he continues to work on more.
Jane Roberts
Video of some of Seth quotes.
List of Seth books:
The Seth Material (1970)
SETH SPEAKS: The eternal validity of the Soul (1972)
The nature of personal reality. (1974)
The unknown reality. (1977)
The nature of the Psyche: Its Human expression. (1979)
The individual and the nature of mass events. (1981)
