This painting of Jane Roberts and Robert Butts was done in oil on Arches paper.
From 1963 to 1984, Jane Roberts went into mystical trances, dictating the contents of these trances to her husband Robert Butts. Year after year, Roberts channeled an entity called Seth, never once contradicting Seth's previous statements, while Butts transcribed these events. This Seth material forms a significant part of the basis of the New Age movement.
Much of this material is about the power of consciousness and the energetic mechanics of creating one's own reality. Seth's metaphysics are both temporal and timeless. What the Seth material does best, in my opinion, is describe features of psychology that may otherwise be easily overlooked. It's possible Seth was a real disembodied entity, like a ghost. It's also possible that Seth was a product of Roberts' unconscious mind.
Neither explanation detracts from the influence the Seth material has had on New Age spirituality. Indeed, scores of New Age texts consist of little more than repackaged ideas from Roberts' channeling sessions. Encouraged by my uncle , I've read much of the Seth material, as well as some of Roberts' channelings of famous historical figures. Nowhere in this material did I find anything overly inconsistent with my own observations about life.
Following a rowdy evangelical upbringing, I rejected organized religion. I then studied various alternative religions and spiritual traditions. Having grown up in churches where people spoke in tongues and became visibly possessed by the holy spirit, I found most of these alternatives somewhat tame. These days, my religion is nature worship, with metaphysics informed by a series of dreams.
Some of these dreams started the same way, with me waking up in my room. Leaving the house reveals that I'm in the world of the dead. I walk by the neighborhood funeral home and all the recently deceased are having a big party. I enter the funeral home and find a room where the departed watch videos of their lives until they're ready to move on. All of which seems like a good enough story for what happens right after death.
In other dreams, I'm touring a large city in this world of the dead. On one occasion, I met a relative who had recently passed. He was young again and he showed me his art collection, made from the best pieces he'd collected over many lifetimes. Dreams like this fit easily into the Seth material. These dreams are just ways of tuning in to a particular possibility space. I choose to pay attention to them because they make a good story.
Jane Roberts spent basically her whole life supporting Seth. Robert Butts transcribed the personality's words throughout this time. A whole community blossomed out of the phenomenon. Clearly, something awesome was going on there.
The strongly individualistic focus of the Seth material does leave some important things out. The power of an individual to choose their own reality is largely determined by social circumstances. Groups are their own thing, as important as individuals, with their own consciousnesses. Maybe I just haven't run across it yet, but I don't recall the Seth material covering group consciousness in any great detail. A future post may explore the topic further.