Jane Roberts

The teaching

Taught from the Seth books she spoke in trance, above all Seth Speaks (1972) and The Nature of Personal Reality (1974).

Each person creates their reality

The teaching of the Seth books turns on one sentence: each person creates their own reality. Physical experience, in Seth's account, is not imposed from outside but formed from within, out of a person's beliefs, thoughts, feelings and imagination, so that the world each one meets is the outward picture of what they inwardly hold. To change experience, change the beliefs that form it.

Beliefs can be seen

Beliefs, Seth teaches, are not buried out of reach. They are held in the conscious mind and can be looked at there like the furniture of a room. His exercise is to write them down: what one believes about one's body, about other people, about money and work, about oneself, and to notice which of them are taken as facts about the world. Some are core beliefs, holding others in place. Feeling and imagination follow belief, and so a belief seen as only a belief can be changed, by imagining vividly and with feeling what its opposite would bring, and by acting as though it were true.

The point of power

The present, Seth says, is the point of power. Neither the past nor the future is fixed: the remembered past is reshaped by present belief, and the future grows from what is believed and imagined now, so that no one is chained by their history. The exercise is to sit quietly, feel the body in this moment, know that this moment is where every change is made, and then picture the state wanted, with feeling, for a few minutes, before letting it go and acting in the ordinary way.

The entity and simultaneous time

Each person, in this teaching, is part of a greater self, the entity, which lives many lives, and the lives are not truly in a row. Time is simultaneous: all of a soul's lives, which we call past and future, are happening at once, and each can draw on the others. Every choice not taken is lived out as well, by probable selves in probable worlds, so that no possibility is wasted.

Consciousness in all things

Everything that exists has consciousness, down to the smallest particle, and there is no dead matter. Seth names units of consciousness, from which come the electromagnetic energy units that build the physical world, so that matter is consciousness taking form, and the body's cells have an awareness of their own. The inner senses, which work without the body, perceive this inner side of things; the first exercise the books give for them is to sit or lie quietly with the eyes closed for a short time each day, attending to the inner images and sounds that come of themselves, which Seth calls psychological time.

Dreams and death

Sleep is not idle. In dreams, Seth teaches, the self works out problems, gathers knowledge, meets others and rehearses the future, and much of what happens by day is prepared by night. Death is no end but a change of surroundings. The self moves on, may not at first know that it has died, is met by others who help it, looks back over the life it has lived, and chooses what to do next: to rest, to learn, or to be born again. There is no hell but the ones beliefs make, and those can be left.

Framework 1 and Framework 2

Late in the series Seth gives a picture of how events are made. Framework 1 is the world of ordinary cause and effect, where effort, planning and the senses work. Framework 2 is the inner, creative medium behind it, where intentions are taken up and events are arranged in ways no plan could manage. The teaching is to state an intention clearly, trust it to Framework 2 and stop worrying at the means, while living well in Framework 1; anxiety, in this teaching, is the belief that the inner medium cannot be trusted.

Health and belief

The same teaching is turned on the body. The Seth books hold that health and illness follow belief and feeling like everything else, that a symptom may serve a purpose the person does not see, and that changed beliefs change the body. That is a belief, and no evidence bears it out. The house adds what it says everywhere: an illness is no one's fault, it belongs with a doctor, and no teaching promises a cure.