Jane Roberts - How to Develop your ESP Power retitled The Coming of Seth

JANE ROBERTS says:

Many people are in the same position I was in when I initiated the experiments listed in this book: Theyve had one brush with an experience that doesnt fit the official views of life, and they want to know more. These simple experiments will send each reader who tries them on an inner journeybasically an unpredictable, creative onefor no two consciousnesses are the same.

Enter, then, the psychic world of Jane Roberts as Seth comes seemingly from nowhere to become her mentor and guideand possibly yours.

Her experiences and experiments will help you to tap psychic powers you never dreamed you had. And they will add refreshing and rewarding new dimensions to your daily life.

THE COMING OF SETH was originally published by Frederick Fell Publishers, Inc.

The coming of seth

Frederick Fell edition published 1966

A POCKET BOOK edition includes every word contained in original higher-priced edition. POCKET BOOK editions are published by POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster. Inc. A GULF WESTERN COMPANY 630 Fifth Avenue, New York, N Y. 10020.

Trademarks registered in the United States and other countries.

ISBN: 0-671-415-4.

Library of Congress Card Number : 66-17331.

Writing a new introduction to this book sends me traveling backward ten years in known earth-time to the early days of my psychic explorations. More than that, though, Im carried swiftly back and forth between the past and present lands of my psyche: I began speaking for Seth in a mediumistic capacity as I was writing this book, and in a way all the books that Seth and I have written since emerged from these pages.

The book was originally titled How to Develop Your ESP Power, and it was based on a series of experiments I devised as a result of my first sudden involuntary out-of-body experience. Here in these chapters I wrote the day-by-day story of those initial experiments that led to the coming of Seth. Each chapter contains excerpts from those early sessions. Seth came seemingly from nowhere. For all I knew, he would disappear back into the unexplainable, remaining only as a remembered psychological puzzle, a strange high point in my life, and I would return to my normal writingenriched, but relatively unchanged.

The first publisher I sent the book to rejected it because of Seths emergence, but offered to publish it if I deleted that part of the story. I was honest enough to refuse. It seemed all right back then to write about psychic phenomena if you investigated it and collected case histories about other peoples experiences, but didnt cloud the issue by having any of your own that, it seemed, made you less capableas if you could explain an orgasm better and more scientifically if youd never had one yourself. I felt that to be a curious attitude, and to a large extent it still prevails.

In any case, the book was published, but it went nowhere. Id quit my job at an art gallery to finish it. The day it appeared in print, I started teaching nursery school. My husband. Robert Butts, and I were invited to appear on a New York television show. We backed out at the last moment after discovering that we were to be treated like psychic superspooks, expected to put on a great show with the Ouija board at the expense of our integrity and the audiences. We decided that wed just keep up with our own sessions and let it go at that.

I wrote another book on dreams and out-of-body experiences, in which I mentioned Seth almost as a footnote, emphasizing the history of psychic phenomena and playing down my own growing experiences. Luckily the editor I sent the book to saw what I was doing and asked for a manuscript about Seth. This developed into the Seth Material.

But this first little book, as no place else, carries the initial enthusiasm in each page, the growing excitement, the countering intellectual questioning, the back-and-forth tension between the validity of our psychic experience and our need to explain it rationally.

There were few reviews for the book, but I was cautioned in some of them against leading my readers astray by encouraging experimentation with the Ouija boardwhich, some said, could lead to psychotic troubles at best, or possession by evil spirits at worst. And here again I maintain ten years later, that evil spirits just dont exist in those terms; only the evil of superstitious fears, ignorance and dogmas that teach people to fear what they dont understand; the same kind of dogmas that lead people into fanaticism rather than tolerance, fear rather than courage, dependence rather than self-reliance.

Many people are in the same position I was in when I initiated the experiments listed in this book: theyve had one brush with an experience that doesnt fit the official views of life, and they want to know more. They don't want to be saddled with the paraphernalia of someone elses dogma. They'd just like an idea of how to proceed. And embarking upon such a search can be fascinating, daring, and amusing all at once.