Table Of ContentALSO BY SUSAN M. WATKINS
Conversations with Seth, Book 2
What a Coincidence!
Speaking of Jane Roberts
Dreaming Myself, Dreaming a Town
Garden Madness
Conversations
with
Seth
introduction by Jane Roberts
Susan M. Watkins
illustrations by George Rhoads
Moment Point Press
Needham, Massachusetts
25th Anniversary Edition, 2005
Copyright © 1980, 1999 by Susan M. Watkins
Preface to the 25th Anniversary Copyright © 2005 by Susan M. Watkins
Moment Point Press, Inc.
PO Box 920287
Needham, MA 02492
www.momentpoint.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews. For information, please address Moment Point Press, Inc.
All illustrations, except figures 1–10, copyright © 1980 by George Rhoads, used by
permission. “Song for Our Bones,” “Small Rain—A Song,” “Reincarnational,” “The Green
Man” copyright © 1980 by Dan Stimmerman, used by permission. “Intrinsic Artists” and
“Ode on Sex and Religion” copyright © 1980 by Barrie Gellis, used by permission. “Follow
Yourself,” “Notes to a Young Man,” Introduction, and all previously unpublished Seth
material copyright © 1980 by Jane Roberts, used by permission.
Cover Design: Susan Ray and Metaglyph Design
Typesetting: Graphic Details
Printing: Transcontinental
Distribution: Red Wheel / Weiser
Library of Congress has cataloged the 1999 combined-volume edition as follows:
Watkins, Susan M., 1945–
Conversations with Seth: the story of Jane Roberts's ESP Class
by Susan M. Watkins; illustrations by George Rhoads.
p. cm.
Originally published: Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980–1981.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-889828-04-1
1. Spirit Writings. 2. Reincarnation—Miscellanea. I. Seth (Spirit), 1929–. II. Roberts,
Jane, 1929–1984. III. Title.
BF1301.W226 1999
133.9’3—dc21 99-070189 CIP
ISBN: 0-9661327-2-6
2005 25th Anniversary Edition:
ISBN-13: 978-1-930491-05-2
ISBN-10: 1-930491-05-0
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Sean, and now Dave,
who unknowing,
Know
Special thanks to:
Jane and Rob, for all the years of assistance and love;
Jeff and his statistics; HughW. and his photocopies and lists;
George R. and his comix; Richie and his exuberant phone calls;
Everyone who took the time and space (non-existent as these
might be) to answer my lengthy questionnaire;
And to:
The ghost of the old Nebene, who showed me the model for this
book, couched as it was inside several other books, all of them
distinct probabilities.
(Te jingjo le é bordujo—mayando.)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition
Preface to the 1980 Edition
Introduction by Jane Roberts
CHAPTER 1 Who Said Truth Was Stranger Than Fiction?
(That's How The Bundu Knew)
CHAPTER 2 The Cast of Class and How It Grew
CHAPTER 3 Experiments: In Which Tables Tipped
and Doors Revealed Their Symbols
CHAPTER 4 Who Hasn't Got a Secret?
(Said the Selves We Loved to Hate)
CHAPTER 5 Belief Box: Seth Assigns Us To Hear Ourselves Think
CHAPTER 6 ESP Revisited: Life and Death and Similar Weird Events
CHAPTER 7 The Sumari (and Others) Come Home
CHAPTER 8 Reincarnation: Survival of the Fitting?
CHAPTER 9 The Naked and the Dread: Or How We Took
Off Our Clothes and Put on the Opposite Sex
CHAPTER 10 The Experiment Continues: Seth II, Mental
Events, and the Birth of the City
CHAPTER 11 Health, Healing, and How We Walked Through
Each Others’ Bones
CHAPTER 12 The War of the Idiot Flowers: In Which Dream Fish,
Spontaneity, and the Draft Are Kicked
Around
Notes
Index
Illustrations
Drawings by George Rhoads
Dedication
Sue Watkins
New York “Boy” Joy Mankowitz
Charlene pine
Priscilla Lantini
Arnold pearson
Geoffrey Beam
Jean Strand
Will petrosky
Florence MacIntyre
Figures
Figure 1. Pat Klein's bird sketch
Figure 2. Jane's bird sketch
Figure 3. Marian Chalmers's bird sketch
Figure 4. Jane's swan outline
Figure 5. Marion Chalmers's drawing
Figure 6. Boots advertisement
Figure 7. Ear drawing
Figure 8. Clothing advertisement
Figure 9. Diagram of class
Figure 10. Florence MacIntyre's drawing
The world will take these ideas as it will. I give them
playfully, joyfully, and humbly, that they may fall as the
seeds fall from a gigantic oak tree. I do not say that every
man must pick up one of those seeds for himself and use
it. I say merely, “I am.” And to you, I say, “You Are.”
Seth in Class
May 7, 1974
Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition
AN INCREASINGLY UNPOPULAR WAR in a distant country. Struggles for gender
and racial equality. Environmental degradation. A growing social and
economic divide. Unfathomable natural disasters of epic proportions. These
were some of the topics debated in Jane Roberts's ESP class a generation or
so ago. Update this mix with 9/11, and you have yesterday's headlines come
‘round again, in only somewhat different guise.
Of course much good has come to pass since the sixties and seventies
(it's even possible we've learned a thing or two), but oh how outrageous
Jane's ideas were back then, the notion that reality springs from the matrix of
our own consciousness. At least as far as mainstream media were concerned,
such things as dreams, ESP, and the so-called paranormal were suspect
psychological anomalies or mere conjectures of science fiction and fantasy.
certainly no credence was given to a connection between individual belief
and mass experience. Except for a few pods of original thinking, such as
Jane's work and her ESP class, the culture was going nowhere but the same
old place.
Sure, there were enormous pressures for social change in those years,
but it was easy to feel outcast and alone. Technologically, the world in
which Jane and Rob embarked on their journeys with Seth in 1963 was
closer to the Civil War era than the one we know today. There were no
home computers, no internet or email, no satellite hookups, no cell phones
or camcorders or VCRs; cable TV was in its infancy and the DVD unknown.
“Reality” television was actually real—Vietnam, taped on-scene while it
happened, a shocking innovation (and one that fed the war protests and
helped end it). But nitty-gritty life issues didn't have the public forums we
take for granted, like them or not. Talk TV and radio shows as we know
them didn't exist. Dilemmas of sex and gender preference, divorce, affairs,
babies out of wedlock, racial discrimination, domestic violence—all were
forbidden territory in a way that's almost impossible to comprehend today,
and required investment of personal energy to disguise, or suffer in silence.
Today, most of this is so public as to be the subject of sitcoms and tell-alls
(hooray for that), and permutations of law and compassion have freed us
from many constraints; yet here we are squabbling over the basics once
again, not to mention the specter of terrorism and its creeping impact on our
social construct and habits.
In that, this 25th Anniversary Edition of Conversations with Seth is as
relevant as if I'd written it yesterday. Jane's ESP class was diverse in age,
background, and politics, but we were united by the feeling that none of the
accepted definitions worked anymore, even when we wished they could.
Reluctantly, with Seth's always wise, frequently exasperating prompting, we
threw out the premise of cause and effect. We chose instead to behave as if
the world were a result of individual and mass beliefs. Anguish, illness,
disasters and joy, anything that happened to us: our creation. No accidents.
Not even one. No excuses.
Daring ourselves along, we wrote belief papers, kept track of dreams,
ranted and raved, laughed and cried while we wrestled with how these ideas
mattered outside the walls of Jane and Rob's apartment. We didn't “study”
the Seth material so much as we pummeled it. Gay and straight, we haggled
our sex lives, told intimate secrets, swapped garb (or threw it off), argued
love and war, draft dodging, fun and responsibility, drugs and religion; and
all of terms of multidimensional existence and purpose, of infinite pasts and
futures alive in the ever-expanding present.
In a way, what we did in class was conservative and ordinary, people
trying to figure out the meaning of life. But in another way, the most
important way, what we did there was magical and wild, more extraordinary
than any of us imagined at the time. It wasn't merely that class included the
presence of “a personality no longer focused in physical reality,” as Seth
described himself, a personality who gave original, beautifully written (and
spoken) material for us to do with what we liked. No, the truly splendid,
utterly scandalous thing about class was that we came to glimpse ourselves
as personalities focused by choice in this reality, not here by accident or dint
of inscrutable deity, with all the implications for consciousness, not to
mention the nature of the universe, rippling out into the world.
But linear time does pass, and in our terms nothing lasts forever. ESP
class ended in 1975 and Jane Roberts died in 1984, leaving this existence
too soon and emptier for it. And so it goes, the sublime mix of past, present,
and future in this rebirth of a tale that began so long ago—or was it just last
Tuesday? I would hope that this anniversay edition of Conversations can
spark a different kind of debate, one that recognizes the thread of
consciousness that ultimately unites us all. As Seth would say—playfully, of
course—“the experiment continues.”
Susan M. Watkins
January 13, 2005
