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Jane Roberts The Nature of Personal Reality Introduction by Jane Roberts I'm proud to publish this book under my own name, though I don't fully understand the mechanics of its production or the nature of the personality I assume in delivering it. I had no conscious work to do on the book at all. I simply went into trance twice a week, spoke in a "mediumistic" capacity for Seth, or as Seth, and dictated the words to my husband, Robert Butts, who wrote them down. I consider the book "mine" in that I don't believe it could have been written without me and my particular abilities. On the other hand, I realize that far more is involved. I had to read the manuscript to find out what was in it, for example; and to that extent the book doesn't seem mine. But what does that mean? My idea briefly is this: Our usual orientation is focused pretty exclusively in what we think of as the "real" world, but there are many realities. By shifting our consciousness, we can glimpse these alternate realities, and all of them are the appearance that Reality takes under certain conditions. I don't believe that we can necessarily describe one in terms of another. For years I've been confused, trying to define Seth in the usual true-and-false world of facts. There he's accepted as an independent spirit—a spirit guide by those with spiritualistic beliefs—or as some displaced portion of my own personality by the scientific community. I couldn't accept either idea, at least not in undiluted form. If I said, "Look, people, I don't think Seth is a spirit in the way you mean," then this was interpreted as an acknowledgement that Seth was only a portion of my personality. Some people thought that I was trying to put Seth down, or deny them the aid of a super-being when at last they thought they'd found one. Actually, I think that the selves we know in normal life are only the three-dimensional actualizations of other source-selves from which we receive our energy and life. Their reality can't be contained in the framework of our creature-hood, though it is being constantly translated through our present individuality. The "spirit guide" designation may be a handy symbolic representation of this idea, and I'm not saying that spirit guides do not exist. I am saying that the idea deserves greater examination, for the spirit guide may represent something far different than we think. The idea can also be limiting if it always places revelatory knowledge outside of us, and tries to make literal some extraordinary phenomena that may be beyond such interpretation. While I was trying to define Seth that way and questioning whether or not he was a spirit guide, I was closed off to some extent from his greater reality, which exists in terms of vast imaginative and creative power that is bigger than the world of facts and can't be contained in it. Seth's personality is quite observable in our sessions, for example, but the source of that personality isn't. For that matter, the origin of any personality is mysterious and not apparent in the objective world. My job is to enlarge the dimensions of that world and people's concepts of it. Seth's books may be the product of another dimensional aspect of my own consciousness not focused in this reality, plus something else that is untranslatable in our terms, with Seth a great psychic creation more real than any "fact." His existence may simply lie in a different order of events than the one we're used to. I'm not saying that we shouldn't apply what we learn to the ordinary world. Certainly I'm trying to do that, and Seth wrote this book to help people deal more effectively with their daily lives. I am insisting that we must be very careful about making literal interpretations, lest we limit a multidimensional phenomenon by tying it down to a threedimensional fact system. Intuitively and emotionally we often understand more than we intel