[Music] oh this is the house in elmira new york where jane roberts first made contact with seth in december 1963 from her second floor apartment jane spent countless hours in trance speaking for seth as her husband robert butts patiently transcribed every word the set phenomenon has resulted in numerous books thousands of pages of unpublished material and the development of a philosophy that has changed the lives of many of us i'm richard kendall i was a member of jane's class for a number of years an experience one doesn't forget the tape you're about to see was
recorded on june 4 1974 it begins with an interview of jane and rob conducted by harold chana and filmed by stephen bell following the interview are excerpts from jane's class filmed later that evening containing the only visual record we have of seth speaking through jane i was at that class and little did i imagine that over 12 years later i'd be introducing this tape hello again the previous tape portion of me speaking was recorded in april 1986. it is now two years later april 1988 the responses to the questions i will be asking have been
accepted from that june 1974 interview originally conducted by harold channel and filmed by stephen bell following that you will see the only visual record of seth speaking through jane roberts let me introduce the individuals crucial to the seth phenomena first there was of course seth seth said he was an entity or personality who no longer needed a physical body who had experienced many different physical lives on earth while speaking through jane he dictated numerous books on the subject of life death dreams and reality jane roberts who died in 1984 was the medium through whom seth
spoke or came through today she'd be called a channeler jane was an author poet and the wife of robert butts robert butts was and today still is an artist who resides in elmira new york besides encouraging jane he took the dictation as seth spoke playing a critical part in bringing the books to fruition until seth ended their lives jane and rob were a typical although artistically inclined couple how does an entity such as seth enter into one's life in jane's case it began with an unusual experience of automatic writing uh this all began uh late
in 1963 uh one evening jane was uh writing poetry after supper as her as her usual custom and she went into an older state of consciousness this was entirely unexpected by her and she had an out-of-body experience she found her consciousness leaving her body and at the same time she began to write in sort of an automatic script you know i've been a poet as a child and i just was right the next thing i knew um my consciousness was just gone and i it wasn't in outer body in the respect that i had another
body or thought i did my consciousness went through like the window and then into the leaves and into everything and it wasn't until i came back then i found this script and realized that you know my i had to have written it yeah the stuff that was in the script was stuff i had felt while i was out to some extent in that um the script again the timer was the physical universe as idea construction the idea being that everything is a result of idea and has consciousness but when i was out i would go
in atoms and molecules and i felt their consciousness but then when i read the script it was terribly hard to accept portions of it because it pretty much went against what i've been taught what was doubly unusual about this experience was that up until this point in their lives both jane and rob knew close to nothing about psychic experiences or the related subject matter i mean i literally i've done no reading in this field i had done nothing so as far as i knew this had never happened before to another it wasn't a super bowl
it was something anyway it was you know where did i go how did i get out of my body this is fantastic this peculiar experience alone did not bring seth into their lives as in all matters people make choices and these choices then bring on new experiences jane and rob could have chosen to ignore this experience to believe that jane was losing her mind or they could have chosen to explore the matter further this is what they finally chose to do i was a writer okay and so um i was i just finished my first
uh science fiction novel which was paperback uh called the rebellers and i was looking for something else to write and robby came up with the idea joking he said why don't you do a book this must have something to do with esp or something right so why don't you get some books read up on it um try some experiments and if they don't work you can always say that while i tried all this stuff and it just doesn't work and if it works well you know you know so we started out um we got two
or three paper bags we found out about leisure boards and everything and we borrowed a ouija board we didn't even buy one and after i forget once or twice or somebody we started to get stuck on the board and with the psychological knowledge i had then the first thing i thought of was well it's a subconscious uh rob was pushing it or rob would say i was pushing it so we went through that long kind of thing and after only um maybe five or six seven sessions with that uh seth came through vocally i would
start to know what was going to be said and then i would start to want to speak okay well on the board the pointer would go over the alphabet and spell messages and after a while the messages said they came from a personality called seth and i didn't particularly believe in survival or personality to begin with uh i also figured that if personalities survived they had a lot better things to do than come through on ouija boards um i thought it was from a level of mind subconscious or something uh the material that we got
however was excellent and i was enough of a critical writer myself to know the material was good otherwise i probably wouldn't have continued it didn't make sense in a philosophical way and if um and it showed no um extravagance in terms of um going overboard religiously uh it was sound psychologically as far as we could tell i still think we were very lucky in that we had not read an awful lot of the current occult literature because if i had worked bored and uh had read a lot and perhaps believed what a lot of people
believed that this had to be either a good spirit or a bad spirit or that this was dangerous i really don't know what i would have done the idea of possession never crossed my mind because i never accepted it to start with i mean it just didn't exist for me right okay yeah well jane didn't even believe in reincarnation what was their next move again each step of their involvement with the seth phenomenon is coolly mocked by the conscious choices they made when the whole thing began it didn't take us long at all to realize
that it was a creative endeavor and that underlay everything else we did and that's the main reason we decided to continue yeah i think that as change said earlier it had been too much of anything uh too sentimental or too uh religious or uh too even uh pragmatic yeah yeah would have turned away from yeah right as it was it suited us of course right and uh so we chose to yeah got a few books and uh i wrote to a few people yes some of them authors of these books yes and the replies we
got uh didn't satisfy us at all and we quickly learned that we had a chance here in a creative way to make a contribution right and at the same time learning on our own yes we went along yeah so all these factors intrigued us exactly yeah because they were based on the strengths of our personalities yeah especially jane's ability with words so we knew it it was obvious that her writing ability was valuable yes assets here and my uh working with images as an artist right that came in handy in all kinds of ways also
we felt as if again because we knew so little that we were explorers and we were going to be very careful about exploring something we didn't understand but we were going to do it right you know ask people to go along with it but we think that we even chose to be born at this time so that in this particular way this information could start to be given up seth himself had not yet directly entered into their lives as far as psychic matters were concerned jane and rob had dabbled with ouija board conducted historical research
yet with developing a genuine excitement and curiosity please note that as jane is speaking next the camera will focus on one of rob's paintings on the wall behind her rob uses images from his dream state when he paints portraits this particular picture is how rob envisioned seth well after the board sessions stop yeah as they did very quickly i just began speaking the words automatically for sec without knowing what i was saying until i came out of trent uh there was no training per site for this no self-hypnosis nothing it just happened although i did
give consent that is um had i not wanted to do it it wouldn't even happen okay i was so curious i wanted to know what was happening um in the beginning i paced the floor constantly in trance i refused to sit down because i had read about casey and he laid down on the couch i thought no not for me i'm not going to you know and i figured that if i didn't like what was going on i could run which was silly because i was the one that was tweening and then it took i
don't know maybe two or three years before i sat down before i then would close my eyes and then it was a period where i closed my eyes and never opened them and then where all of a sudden i opened them but i was in a deeper course kind of trance than i had been before that transition uh the one point on reincarnation i wanted to mention though too a lot covered in the video go ahead okay was that uh one of my first short stories was on reincarnation and i thought as an idea or
a concept it was great i love to play around with it but when this starts happening when say magic becomes real and all of a sudden you're told why you had this kind of life where you did this or this is a fact then i bought because it was one thing for me to play around with the concept and think well i go for it or i don't or what and another to um accept it it's a different fact of existence and uh also i don't like and never have and accept this neither the idea
of karma as it's been spoken about so much the idea of guilt where people believe for example that they're suffering in this life because of a karma that they have in the past life i don't believe in that kind of connection and also i believe that all time happens at once so reincarnations have to exist at the same time as this life and there has to be a constant give and take all at once right i like the idea simultaneously what does a couple do after experiences such as these remember this was 1963 there was
no new age movement the youth counter culture or hippie movement of the late 1960s hadn't yet occurred shirley maclaine was simply an actress as was jane fonda there were no health videos nor variety of talk shows featuring channeling health consciousness meant eating hot dogs and playing softball mediums and fortune tellers were found in carnivals next to the fat lady and the strong man so what did jane and rob do this stuff wasn't accepted in those days to begin with but uh until i actually started speaking present i had never heard of anyone speaking for anyone
i had heard of um what is it ruth kernan but i had never heard of anyone speaking for anyone so again when that happened for all i knew i was the only one alive no but i wasn't about to go and tell the neighbors particularly either jane and rob stuck to it and continued their experiments and experiences with seth letting only a few close friends in on what was happening from these private sessions group classes soon started and seth books were not only published but sold in the millions jane and rob never let seth's popularity
go to their heads they never saw publicity they shunned meteor interviews and were very careful to avoid becoming dogmatic leaders of any particular group or creed they never realized how popular seth would become but i've learned over the years that other people are really interested and each person's interest is just as legitimate as the next and so we've learned a lot from that we didn't anticipate any such uh response from others at all do you think in the beginning people are very interested in this and there are um certainly spiritualistic groups where they have a
so-called spirit guide now i don't call seth a spirit guide either i find myself in a peculiar position in that i don't particularly accept i do want to watch my words the dogma of any particular group organization this was my experience i wasn't about to have it interpreted for me by others i never thought of seth as some white cloaked spirit who was just floating around uh part of my life's work certainly is to try to understand the nature of our personalities you know our personalities what abilities we've got uh what happens so that we
can get this kind of information and one of the things that i really hope is that people would begin to trust their own regulatory experience and not automatically cloak it in whatever dogma they believe in right that's beautiful that's how the stuff phenomenon came about but what was it actually like to be a medium for seth how did others relate to the seth personality other people relate to him uh because they see the phenomena and they see sex come through whatever terms you want to use uh where i am not able to relate in that
same way but you have your feelings that your interior experiences are unique right and no one else can approach those in the beginning jane was always asking me what did he say uh how did he say it yes uh was he nice to these people that were here yeah and so forth and so on and i will do my best to explain but this is all from an observer's standpoint it doesn't mean as much as heroin subjective experience in private session do you think he is um to the point uh when he comes through he
says good evening or something then he says dictation and he just goes ahead and dictates a book it would say to robbie or your finger's tired you want a break or whatever in class he very rarely goes into that kind of a long monologue which for us might last over an hour instead he'll relate to people or he'll come through because of a comment someone asks that concludes our interview with jane roberts and her husband robert butts originally conducted on june 4th 1974. following you will see something unique and exclusive the only existing video of
seth speaking through jane roberts this took place later in the evening during a seth class in jane's living room in john clemo's book channeling published by jeremy tarcher in 1987 jane roberts is credited as being the first medium of modern times the one who pioneered the current new age channeling phenomenon klimo writes the modern era of channeling began with jane roberts and her source seth the publication and widespread distribution of millions of copies of the assorted set books beginning in the early 1970s brought channeling to broader public attention than had anything or anyone in this
century except for edgar cayce and now for the first time in any major metropolitan area in the world we will broadcast seth actually speaking through jane i'll beat you good evening and understand your responses to our friend here [Applause] for when he speaks [Applause] you fear the vocabulary because you fear the beliefs that you still are are afraid operate you are afraid that after allah the others are right you are not sure of your position and therefore you must defend it with the greater beams you've sinned in our abuela meaning and uh beautiful friend those
are beliefs against which yourself have fought for so long and you are afraid that in your heart of heart you do not address the joyful integrity of your own being you are afraid that after all the old stories may be correct and there is something wrong in your creaturehood that you are after all put down because you are human and that you are after all uh damned because you are what you are and that no matter what you say or do you are originally in one way or another damn you are afraid because our friend
and that after all what he unconsciously feels and what sometimes uh comes up in history is right after you must ascend meaning that there is something wrong with where you are and what you are now in those terms what you want to be is within you now and within your glowing creature as he tried to say there is a no above or below you are blessed because of your being not damned because of it as i have told you often there is a spiritual love biology within your being and it speaks to each of your
moments and i threw up your sexual experiences it speaks when you drink a glass of water or when now you are wiggle up your foot that is also a highly biological nature to your spirituality your atoms and your molecules and your cells know themselves to be part of all that is they do not question that does not mean that there is anything wrong with with questioning it doesn't mean now that i say to you that you are blessed because you are that your spirituality is known now through the glories of your pleasure and that your
flesh becomes a more spiritual because of its existence to the seasons and it's experienced with the timer that you know and or recognize you form your own ready i say this to you each week yet through your own dream experiences and uh through the suggestions that i will give are you that i hope that you will follow you will not be able to discover this for yourself what i hope to be able to show you the different levels of consciousness in which you dwell up again as i have i said above all you are indeed
given the gift of the gods you former your reality what better gift could be given to you how then how could you imagine now that you are began this present excursion into this current life already damned florida or forsaken if each of our buddha simply listen up in the quiet of your own mind to the music of your own self you would i know that the atoms within a you speak with [Music] those atoms and the molecules are luckily have not read many of the books that you have read and they do not read uh
your newspapers they know that they are blessed because they are they know what if some of you are more serious people will forgive me and i close on my eyes so as not to embarrass you they know that existence is fun they realize that a fan is their own reality they form these atoms and molecules and cells the reality that you are think of as a physical body the atoms are within your toe do not stop and say oh i must be a responsible ear and a sober and form this toe are and i must
think very carefully before i move because after all i am damned to begin with you would have a summer toe your being it's important the fact that you are my friend impresses us the universe and that impression is never lost that impression that lives up in your terms though time itself is forgotten and guys your being as it is uh is uh important and whatever you do it is not the trivial when you realize that your being is important then you will realize that by being up your sin you will do what in your terms
important things that you cannot do what otherwise now we are here a smaller group and you meet them with yourself and with me many of you weekly in an intimate relationship there are we listen up to me speak and i believe that you are there or didn't though i cannot see uh you you are quite invisible or to we you are can see the people in this room and so you believe in their existence but they cannot see you to realize that though we cannot see you we agree that you exist i am sure that
you do not need our agreement nevertheless we all ask you to realize that when now you look in the mirror you see uh images of of your sins but you do not perceive the inner self that you know exists and so each of us here ask each of you to realize that you have an inner identity that you cannot physically perceive and an inner voice that you do not hear with your audience each of us here therefore asks you to admit the validity of your own being to enjoy the being that you see and a
feel and touch and yet to realize that you have a stiller greater vitality and a reality the most scandalous manner possible to realize one thing that you are good that you are blessed and that there is nothing wrong with you now there are many levels of consciousness and awareness and there are ways that things are said and the anna said there are gestalts or families of consciousness each of you belong to such families you are yourself yet as you have physical family you have families of consciousness so most of the people in this room to
yourself for your ah [Applause] by the message if only we can now show our yourselves enough then you will trust yourselves enough to explore those dimensions of your own greater reality that no one else can ever know or ever explore there are journeys of consciousness that no one i can take about you and yet as you take them our you take steps in other terms for others and you need a marks for your brothers and sisters to follow in their own explorations that say i have been here the place is safe i leave are you
a sign of peace your being alone is important and the hells of validity beyond inner philosophy that is the message that you are are trying not to give up do you think you are each trying to rediscover for yourselves uh in your terms and now after centuries of myths and distortions the validity of your own being i ask you not to trust the validity of my being which is none of your concern but to trust the validity of your being which is very much of your concern now class members here know what i am doing
i ask are you then to sense the energy in this voice and i know that it is your own joyful vitality i ask you to feel it and enjoy it as your own and those who may view this glass i'll request that you also feel of the energy of your being and know that this voice is but a d maker of that vitality and a validity that is your own [Music] that you think where do you know you may find yourself with a random thought that does not seem to fit in with what you are
doing or thinking at the time and so you dismiss it it seems random because it does not appear to fit in now with your organized picture of reality but it is an important mosaic that you throw away so i also joyfully and playfully here and creatively [Applause] challenge our each other even now jerky boy over here to become more and uh more aware of your weakened experience and of those screen thoughts that come in your terms are like seals in the night they are not official you do not accept them the intellectual says oh no
listen to those foot open your mind a might further in your ordinary waking life in the middle of your ordinary pursuits and see what miracles are there and i say miracles because they can help her transform your own understanding and your own relative and you have been blinder to them because you fear you will lose our your identity your identity instead you'll see can grow and include such experiences now i told are you that class was quickening so the time is riper for each of you so this week particularly besides the suggestions that i gave
be gentle with your own experience do not be such a disciplinarian that when strayer thoughts or intuitions are come out who you you dismiss servants that feels up of your own beings are filled with flowers that you do not recognize that you do not stop to look at them or smell they're orders they are not official flowers or officials sometimes you try to be uh too up practical you are ever lovely is those eyes do not try to be practical they see out of the joy of their being they do not uh hustle themselves the
right eye does not say is that what i am seeing right and the left eye does not say is what i am seeing uh wrong they see you together and in being themselves they see uh for you for the atoms within your eyes do not see this imager though you do you interpreted the image and you see what you see the eyes the vision the reality of the atoms and molecules that exist within the eye that vision is far different and yet there is no disagreement so there is no disagreement between your official reality and
those are unofficial realities that sometimes sneak come on class has been over now quite some time but the events that transpired during those years will never really have an ending and as seth might have said and other terms have yet to begin well let's see usually it feels spontaneous uh that is i don't do anything to induce the chance yeah it did my facial teachers change to one extent or another is different than my regular one obviously my own teachers are being used my voice becomes uh quite a bit deeper it gets an accent that's
rather difficult to describe everybody calls it a different kind of an accent just simply says it's a cosmopolitan my eyes are usually open i can't see really well for example without glass because i will dry the stuff immediately take my glasses off people that attend sections say that he looked at them in a very penetrating but nice manner obviously has excellent vision he speaks in an animated manner the voice is more masculine and feminine so i don't think is mistaken for neil's voice it's very deep but it after i still have to use my vocal
cords at times the voice can become quite loud and other times in a regular session it has a more complicated song seriously sometimes i'm having an out-of-body experience of my own and experience some place else that sometimes i'm able to check out sometimes i just sort of um bask in a feeling of great energy and i have different kinds of experiences a lot of people are not familiar with what happens in astro travel or other body experience when you mean you're out experiencing other things could you amplify that james well on several occasions while ted
was speaking i would feel my own consciousness my name as far as i'm concerned leave my body and travel to another location up until that time i had more or less believed that human beings and animals and people were alive uh saying rocks were dead the consciousness was something that belonged to the kind of species that i could understand and when i was out of body i really didn't feel the consciousness of uh wants trees even the nail that happened to be in our windowsill everything had a consciousness to it according to that there's no
particular number of lines that you live that if you don't have to live 5 or 10 or 100 or whatever each entity would make its own choices according to the end of his own purposes all lives exist at one time it's the same idea of einstein's that time is relative to the perceiver while we perceive time as a series of moments one after another and essentially that's how we react but in a basic reality they all exist at one time i'll try an analogy it's as if you have a man who is a husband a
father a member of a civic organization a teacher a member of a sports organization and perhaps another group of organizations all at one time now he has no trouble keeping track of all those separate activities but while he is being a father in his home with his wife and kids he might completely forget for a while to teach himself or his students and the father and the member of these different organizations again to keep track of himself and something that he does as a father will also affect something that he does as a teacher therefore
karma the idea of karma has been misunderstood to mean something like cause and effect that as many people believe that for example in this life they might have a certain uh problem because in a past life they did something that was wrong instead all lives would be ones and there would be an open-ended relationship between them so that so i admit this sounds far out as you lived now you would also be affecting a reality that in our terms would have happened back in the 14th century so i don't use the term karma and that
doesn't as a rule either but the idea would be if that kind of situation happened that the individual would have chosen different kinds of relationships that is saying one life you might choose to be the healthiest the strongest most athletic person in the world and in another life you might choose to be really in miserable physical shape not to teach yourself anything more in conventional terms but to have the experience of what it's like to feel the universe from different kinds of focuses and to learn not that it's noble to suffer but that as you
experience life from different focuses there's different kinds of experiences that become highly important the lives would be interrelated than one causing the other and seth doesn't speak for example in terms of time and punishment so that you wouldn't have one kind of a life to punish yourself for another kind of a life but to understand a particular kind of experience uh go slowly with me here you believe reset at least have said that time happens all at once we're all doing whatever we do in other lives all at once uh as we are between lives
what does that describe life after and before a new birth oh this is tricky he would say that we are in our job alive and not alive at the same time you're not helping me okay since our lives exist at once then the duration between lives wouldn't exist in the in those terms at all anyway you're alive and dead at the same time right what's going on at that time right you mean when you die what's gonna happen yeah i suppose that's a nice way of putting i don't know it's nice but i know what
you mean the situation will vary according to the individual that for example your beliefs will dominate you will continue to exist but if you believe say in a conventional christian heaven that's what you'll experience for a while you might get bored after a while which takes will change but that there will be people that you've known in this life or in other lives they will help you now those people can be living they're dead in our terms okay all right i think okay say today i die and i didn't really have any great relationships with
my parents in this life but i have a great relationship with a parent in the 18th century that person might be alive today well i know but if so they would beat me in their dream state so i would be dead in my turn the dream state is like an in-between open dimension in which all different kinds of realities emerge if i die and i believe in hell and brimstone fire that's what i'm going to die into for a period of time yeah but it would be you know forever sometimes soul would be there to
tell you look you don't have to experience that but it is interesting that we're actually programming ourselves for what we expect after death now that we create our own reality not only now but later the idea would be that we do create our own reality but we are not victims no one is a victim therefore that those people who have been murdered or played or whatever for their own reasons had a psychological need for that kind of experience so they were not innocent victims as such right they were destined to get what they got because
they really wanted they were not destined to die they chose to yeah okay right boy that's really something it's very tricky because i don't want it to be interpreted to say something like uh well it's okay to murder somebody because the guy you murder wants to be killed you're not saying that at all what you're saying in those past instances those people chose right there's no other way to look at it i guess the way i look at it either we are victims in an unfeeling or sensing dumb chaotic universe and everything is the result
of chance or accident or we are masters of our gate there's no in between and i choose the other way i don't think that any person no matter how gifted they are can feel your reality in the same way or know exactly what you are thinking at any point they might know what you're thinking now or now or now but that they can't know what you're thinking all the time there's such things as psychics real yeah psychics are real enough i think that any person who calls himself a guru and says that i know what
you are i know what you should do i lay these rules down to you to some extent is deluding himself in you also because i think that the miracle of being is too great and i think that each of us has to find our own way i'm afraid with all my experience i'm not sure the answer i think we are here to be the cell that we are and in the mystery of that being the answer will unfold itself and that's really the only answer that i can give so there's no simple straightforward assignment i
don't think that we can say okay the answer is we're here to help others or we're here to learn or whatever i think those are all easy answers that we've been given i think the answers are deeper and more complicated than that but i do think that the hints to the answers lie in our potential and in what we are and in trying to understand what we are and be more of ourselves and bring ourselves into some kind of fulfillment and then in that being the answers will make themselves known [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you