Seth and The Telepathy Tapes: Seth Takes Form – Blocks of Material
As Jane Roberts grew more confident in speaking Seth’s words aloud, the nature of the communication began to change – dramatically. What had started as halting, one-word-at-a-time utterances soon transformed into fluid, continuous streams of thought. The words began to arrive in full conceptual blocks: whole paragraphs, structured arguments, and teachings that were not only coherent but often profound. Jane no longer had to search for the next sentence – it arrived fully formed, often accompanied by a powerful inner experience of the concepts under discussion, as if she was engaging with the material directly. Her voice now carried Seth’s tone with conviction, rhythm, and a strong sense of personality.
Seth was taking form.
This development marked a new stage in the unfolding phenomenon. The entity who called himself Seth was no longer just a presence whispering words; he had become a teacher – clear, articulate, and inexhaustibly deep. The lecture-type format was being established, a conveyance of information that Seth described as “intrusions of knowledge from one dimension of activity to another,” complete with opening remarks, philosophical exposition, clarifying examples, and often the sharp humour or gentle irony Seth became known for. The early uncertainty and skepticism that Jane had felt began to dissolve, replaced by a sense of participating in something far larger than herself.
What Seth brought forth in these sessions was not vague spiritual comfort, but an intricate metaphysics of consciousness. He spoke of the self as multidimensional, of time as an illusion created for focus and learning, and of physical reality as a training ground – an agreed-upon construction shaped by beliefs and intentions. He explained reincarnation not as a linear chain of lives, but as simultaneous expressions of a single greater identity unfolding across various probabilities, eras, and timelines. We’ll see how this perfectly comports with the non-speaking children’s description of reincarnation in an upcoming chapter.
What made Seth’s teachings so startling was not just their content, but the clarity and immediacy with which they were delivered. As she paced back and forth across the large living room during each session, smoking Pall Mall cigarettes, and occasionally sipping wine or beer (a modest amount of alcohol was found to be helpful in maintaining the session trance), Jane was not reading from notes, nor was she arranging the ideas consciously. Seth’s material arrived full-blown – as if he were transmitting finished concepts, energetically encoded, compact and concise, and Jane’s consciousness served as the interpreter, unpacking them into language. Her role was not to invent, but to render. As Rob observed and recorded every word, it soon became clear that they were not simply exploring ideas – they were receiving a structured philosophy of being that would end up running to more than eight thousand typed pages.
The content of these blocks of material began to mirror, in striking detail, the kinds of non-ordinary awareness described decades later by the autistic children in The Telepathy Tapes. One child, Houston, spoke of time not as a sequence but as a simultaneity: “Time is happening all at the same time.” Another, Asher, spoke of reincarnational lives as happening all at once: “we’re all having all of our lives lived all of the time.”
These assertions, astonishing for children with limited verbal expression, are virtually identical to Seth’s teaching that reincarnational lives are not behind or ahead of us in a chronological chain, but are instead simultaneous expressions of the self operating in different contexts. Seth explained that the “past” selves we believe ourselves to have outgrown are still alive – still making choices – and those choices affect us now, just as ours affect them. There is, in his words, “only a spacious present,” within which all events, identities, and probabilities coexist.
What Houston and Asher described through direct knowing, Seth articulated with philosophical rigor. Both pointed toward a vision of consciousness that transcended time, linear determinism, and individual boundaries. This parallel suggests that Jane was not simply giving voice to abstract theories. She was translating, in real time, a kind of knowing that is native to nonverbal realms – realms that children like Houston and Asher appear to access spontaneously.
With each new session, Seth’s voice grew more assured, his teachings more detailed. The blocks of material built upon each other to become the foundation for a new understanding of existence – one in which reality is seen not as deterministic and external, but as fluid, participatory, and multidimensional.