The Problem of Seth's Origin: A Case Study...

The Problem of Seth's Origin: A Case Study of the Trance-Possession Mediumship of Jane Roberts

Paul Cunningham

Jane Roberts channeled the purported discarnate entity called "Seth" from 1963 through 1984. The purposes of this paper are to (a) discuss the question of whether the content of a mediumistic communication can aid in determining the source of that communication, (b) address a gap in the literature by presenting an outer history of the trance-possession mediumship of Jane Roberts, and (c) examine eight explanations for Seth's origin in light of the published evidence of the case, including fraud, cryptomnesia, hypnotic self-suggestion, incipient schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, high creativity, psi functioning, basic source Aspect, and energy personality essence. Either Seth is or is not a production of Jane Roberts' psyche. In either case, we are led to the possibility that human personality may have a greater reality and greater awareness than is generally supposed.

In order to advance understanding of the content/source problem in mediumship research in a creative and productive way, the use of an analogy approach is recommended. The aim is to avoid stereotyped and functionally fixed thinking that can frame the content/source problem in a narrow and limited manner and block conceptual understanding of the problem space and perception of potential problem solutions. In the present context, the use of an analogy approach means looking at non-parapsychological content/source problems that have similar abstract, underlying meaning (structural features), but different superficial content and specific details (surface features). It means using the solution to similar, more familiar problems to help solve less familiar, more difficult ones (Gentner, Holyoak, & Kokinov, 2001). That is, can the study of more familiar analogical situations outside the field of mediumistic research (such as historical studies and literary analysis) show how rational analysis of documentary content to determine a communication's source be productively applied to case studies of deceased mediums such as Jane Roberts? For example, Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Henry Murray, and Robert White have constructed logically coherent and consistent psychobiographies of historically significant individuals by studying prototypical scenes in the life of the subject and by using "salience markers" to identify significant patterns of life events (Elms, 1993; Schultz, 2005).

Forensic analysis of the informational content of a crime scene has aided investigators in determining the identity of perpetrators. If the content of a communication is intelligible and reasonable, it suggests that that the source of the communication is both intelligent and rational. A communication expressed in written or spoken English implies that the communicator knows something about the surface structure and deep structure of the language. These examples illustrate some of the ways the rational analysis of informational content have aided in a characterization of its source....

I always get annoyed when people recommend that I or someone else read "the Seth material" because the only reason they seem to have to care about it or take it seriously is "because a spirit said it, therefore it must be true". It's easily the most over hyped, over cited spiritualist material out there. that really doesn't say anything of substance from what I've seen from the scraps people incessantly post in youtube comments and elsewhere thinking they're super deep and profound. As one person I saw once said about something similar "it's ten cents of buddism in thousand dollar packaging."

To cut to the chase in this case...

This study arrives at the provisional conclusion that the origin of the Seth material is probably an advanced spiritual entity (an "energy personality essence"), by systematically ruling out the other suggested possibilities. I can't really judge this because I haven't studied the Seth material at all deeply, and I think this conclusion basically hinges on the validity or not of this study's assessment that this cumulative collective output is of a very high order: 

"The challenge for psychology is to explain how Jane Roberts of Elmira, New York, could suddenly possess and exhibit an ability to compose scientific, philosophic, psychological, and ethical material of a very high order of sophistication and intellectual rigor with no previous study or instruction, in sudden full-blown fashion, with the same facility and power from start to finish. Here we have a mass of writings consisting of complex, discursive, internally consistent, and highly rational narratives, much of it produced in an animated, light trance state of consciousness (with characteristic dissociation, amnesia, and excursus of the ego) in which nothing can be discovered regarding the history, education, or environment of Jane Roberts that suggests any solution to the problem of how she acquired such knowledge or ability."

From the Conclusion:

"The published record of Jane Robert's trance-possession mediumship suggests that fraud and cryptomnesia are highly improbable explanations. The duration of the phenomena, the intelligibility and rationality of its content, and the phenomenological processes underlying Jane Roberts' communication with Seth all argue against the hypothesis that Seth is a production of incipient schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder. To emphasize and expect fraud and trickery, cryptomnesia, or psychopathology in cases of mediumship is to raise what is essentially a misleading, though culturally expectable, response to an uncanny encounter. Hypnotic self-suggestion may account for the production of the Seth-trance, but would not by itself account for the content of the Seth material. High creativity and psi functioning provide plausible explanations for the quality of the content of Seth's communications, but do not satisfactorily account for all aspects of the phenomenon considered in toto. A more adequate (adequatio) account would have to include Jane Roberts’ understanding and judgment of her own experience and Seth's explanation of himself."

Seth's own explanation of himself is given earler in the paper:

"You may call me whatever you choose. I call myself Seth. It fits the me of me, the personality more clearly approximating the whole self I am, or am trying to be. I have been conscious before your earth was formed. In your dreams you have been where I am. My communications come through Ruburt's [Seth's entity name for Jane Roberts] subconscious. But as a fish swims through water, as the fish is not the water, I am not Ruburt's subconscious. Ruburt assembles me or allows me to assemble myself in a way that will be recognizable to you, but regardless of this, I exist in an independent manner. What I am is difficult to explain because of the limits set not only by your own knowledge but by the method of our communication. You cannot understand what I am unless you understand the nature of personality and the characteristics of consciousness. I am simply an energy essence personality, no longer materialized in physical form. Personality and identity are not dependent upon physical form. It is only because you think they are that you find this sort of performance so strange. You are presently focused entirely within physical reality, wondering perhaps what else if anything there may be outside. I am outside, returning momentarily to a dimension that I know and loved.

My mission is to remind you of the incredible power within your own being, and to encourage you to recognize and use it. If I succeed in convincing you of my reality as a separate personality, I will have done exceedingly well. I speak, myself, for those portions of your being that already understand. My voice rises from the strata of the psyche in which you also have your existence. Listen, therefore, to your own knowing."

There are a number of parallels with the famous case of "Patience Worth", psychically produced by Pearl Curran, an ordinary person to all intents and purposes, with no higher education and not a reader. This creative output was also of a very high order and of huge volume, consisting of 29 volumes of novels, poems, proverbs, aphorisms, witticisms, and conversational repartee. It was generated automatically, and started as in Jane Robert's case, with an ouija board.

"Pearl Curran occasionally carried out directly competing tasks like writing a letter to a friend, while at the same time producing a novel for instance...
There was extreme fluency, virtuosity and speed in the performance...Patience typically produced her material without delay and faster than a stenographer could write it down, pausing only to let the stenographer catch up."  (Irreducible Mind, pg. 449)

I think that for similar reasons to those in the case of the Seth material, it was probably a spiritual entity of a high level that was responsible, rather than some sort of sub-personality. 
Patience Worth claimed to be an actual 17th century person, and whether this was true or she was an invented personality is another separate issue.  No records have been found of such a person, and I think the persona of the author was invented, but the creator of it all was indeed an advanced spiritual entity apart from Pearl Curran.

To cut to the chase in this case...

This study arrives at the provisional conclusion that the origin of the Seth material is probably an advanced spiritual entity (an "energy personality essence"), by systematically ruling out the other suggested possibilities. I can't really judge this because I haven't studied the Seth material at all deeply, and I think this conclusion basically hinges on the validity or not of this study's assessment of this cumulative collective output as being of a very high order:

Part of the challenge is there is so much Seth material, with some parts being very interesting speculation on the nature of reality and some of it seeming like complete nonsense.

I've thought about doing a complete reading of it all, but I just don't know if it is worth the time...

Part of the challenge is there is so much Seth material, with some parts being very interesting speculation on the nature of reality and some of it seeming like complete nonsense.

I've thought about doing a complete reading of it all, but I just don't know if it is worth the time...

I highly doubt its worth it, at least from the quotes people pull out of it. I mean, you'd think if you're going to quote something you're going to choose the best stuff that really shows the point or the message or the value of the rest of the material, etc, but if quotes like "you'll be kicking yourself when you realize how simple it all is" or similar are the best people can find, or what they actually think is super profound or whatever, then its not going to be worth a read as far as I'm concerned.

I found the Seth Material way back in 1981 and it had a profound influence on my thinking. At that stage, I was uneducated in matters of spirituality, knew nothing of Buddhism or Eastern spiritual beliefs and virtually nothing about philosophy or idealism. Yet even before picking up my first Seth book I had a vague idea of what reality must be like and the Seth material crystallised that concept for me. I've often said that reading it felt like coming home. I could believe that reality is a mental construct and that thoughts and beliefs carried consequential weight. 

Later I read more about idealism and some Eastern philosophies and realised that Seth was painting a picture of reality that was a pretty good fit for these ancient philosophies. I didn't feel that either the Seth Material or those philosophies were in any way devalued by the retelling, just that I now knew that I had come from a place of complete ignorance and was guided by this strange channelled material whereas others had taken a more orthodox route to what is essentially an idealistic worldview.

I think it is so easy for people like Mediochre to sneer but some of us had to find a path not provided by esoteric personal experiences or some kind of spiritual training.

For Sciborg - I really don't think that you would learn much from Seth. Nor do I have any answer to the fact that the material contains contradictions and some utter nonsense. My own feeling is that Seth was, as Jane herself suspected, a kind of creation that she, as an accomplished creator of fictional personalities, manifested to deliver what she was able to access while in trance. Whether any of that information came from one or more spiritual entities is an open question but the possibility of different sources might explain some of the contradictions and variations in quality of the material.

I found the Seth Material way back in 1981 and it had a profound influence on my thinking. At that stage, I was uneducated in matters of spirituality, knew nothing of Buddhism or Eastern spiritual beliefs and virtually nothing about philosophy or idealism. Yet even before picking up my first Seth book I had a vague idea of what reality must be like and the Seth material crystallised that concept for me. I've often said that reading it felt like coming home. I could believe that reality is a mental construct and that thoughts and beliefs carried consequential weight. 

Later I read more about idealism and some Eastern philosophies and realised that Seth was painting a picture of reality that was a pretty good fit for these ancient philosophies. I didn't feel that either the Seth Material or those philosophies were in any way devalued by the retelling, just that I now knew that I had come from a place of complete ignorance and was guided by this strange channelled material whereas others had taken a more orthodox route to what is essentially an idealistic worldview.

I was thinking about my beginnings yesterday. It wasn't Seth which was my doorway or introduction, but  Albert Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus. What happened yesterday? I was listening to an old Kate Bush record - mainly because I recalled I liked the bass line. Them Heavy People - Kate Bush

They open doorways that I thought were shut for good
They read me Gurdjieff and Jesu
They build up my body, break me emotionally
It's nearly killing me, but what a lovely feeling

Around about the time of hearing that song originally, I had my own group of "heavy people" but rather than discussing Gurdjieff, it was Albert Camus.

That seemed to trigger something in me. A journey starting with  meaninglessness led to an interest in exploring ideas about the nature of our existence. Eventually I found myself agreeing  "that reality is a mental construct and that thoughts and beliefs carried consequential weight".

I haven't read Seth, but I think those ideas have dispersed and found themselves reappearing in the writings of others. I'm not sure, having arrived at where I am now, to what extent all of the reading and weighing of ideas has been a process of learning, or whether it was simply a remembering of what I already knew, at some level. One cannot just sit and ponder to try to remember - well most of us - but by reading widely, that which fits remains, and that which doesn't fit falls away.

Just on Dave's (Seth's) concept of mental constructs. Assuming this means that "heaven" (for want of a less controversial word) is a mental construct or a collective construct, I tend to think it isn't and that it is rather something elementary and substantial persisting with it's own laws and properties. 

My 'friend' who paid this "place" a visit (after a cardiac arrest) didn't seem to me to be describing something he'd created. It was there, another world beyond his wildest dreams and comprehension (OTT but true) but not something he could have conceived of.

I suspect I must me misunderstanding something ?

I think there are different applications of the idea. On an individual level we don't create the entire universe. What we create is our perception of it, the way we experience it, and events, including those in our own lives as well as impacting on others.

The larger reality - such things as heaven perhaps, would be a collective matter, not something we make as individuals, but we can certainly contribute to it. Who was it who suggested the universe was a great thought? Apparently Sir James Jeans: "The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine."