The afterdeath journal of an American philosopher

The Afterlife Journal of an American Philosopher is  Jane Roberts’ version of the afterlife reflections of the great American philosopher and pioneer of psychology William James. Jane Roberts, an excellent writer and thinker in her own right, became famous for channeling the "interdimensional teacher" known as Seth. Seth was unknown to the public before Jane started publishing the Seth material but was quickly recognized as an extraordinary guide to the multidimensional self and to dreaming as the best way to explore the multiverse and practice reality creation.
    Here we find Jane in contact with a mind that influenced many in this world before it left the body. Like other luminaries of the Society for psychical Research, William James was keenly interested in assembling scientific evidence of the survival of consciousness after physical death. Like his British associates F.W.H. Myers and W.T. Stead, he let it be known that after he took up residence on the Other Side. he would seek to report back, via sensitives, on what he had discovered. What better scientific data on survival could there be than first-hand reports from the afterlife from towering and trustworthy intellects like his own?
    I have deep appreciation for what came through from Stead (The Blue Island) and Myers (The Road to Immortality).  The Afterlife Journal of an American Philosopher has less geography and fewer road maps. It was transcribed  69 years after the death of the supposed communicator in 1910. However, it is a wonderfully plausible account of a desirable afterlife environment, especially interesting on what persuades the dead to take a lively interest in the living.

     Can we believe that the voice is really that of William James? We are told, “I am the William James that I was but I am no longer William James in the same way that he adult is not the child.” He says he is more “lively” now than he was in life, when he was prone to deep depression.
     His role has changed. He is no longer an investigator of psychic phenomena but an ideal case study for later investigators. “I have turned from being an investigator of ‘strange sources’ into a perfect instance of the kind of phenomena that in life I would have tracked down.” 

     Looking back over the life he left behind, he says that had he known what he now knows: “I would have sought more ambitiously for proof of the soul’s existence in life rather than seeking for evidence of its afterdeath existence through communications from the dead. The soul’s abilities in life, clearly defined , would in life show themselves to be independent of the body’s physical confinements. Therefore I would have looked even more vigorously for accelerations and extensions of the creative abilities as they appear in telepathy, clairvoyance, healings and out of body travel, and I would have examined those characteristics of mind (or soul) that display mind’s control of matter” 

    He tries to describe how the mind generates the reality we inhabit often without recognizing what is going on. “The private cast of consciousness works upon the objective world landscape by giving it its final, private, definite form; as if before the individual perceives objects, here is instead a field of pliable, malleable, pseudoshapes. The perceptions themselves bring these into focus and form…The processes are so smooth and automatic, so beautifully executed, that man rarely catches himself in the act of this multiple creativity, as the mind forms the world pattern of objects and events.”
    Active dreamers will be encouraged by the suggestion that dreams may be test patterns, rehearsals for physical events that will follow. “Dream images and imaginative acts prepare the way for physical ones, impressing large areas in general preshapes which are later ‘filled in’. It is as if the mind makes preliminary test patterns that are projections in space-time, but in a ghostly fashion. These dream images, however, are laid upon initial fields of probabilities which are characteristic of the physical medium itself.”
    One thing the philosopher reporting from the afterlife can confirm for sure: "lifelines begin before birth and continue after it."

For more on the adventures of the great Victorian "ghost hunters" before and after death, please see The Dreamer's Book of the Dead.

The inner psychic combustion that gave us a great multidimensional teacher

There is one God, but within that God are many. There is one self, but within that self are many. There is one body, in one time, but the self has other bodies in other times. All “times” exist at once.

The voice is that of Seth, the "energy personality essence" channeled by Jane Roberts. We are near the beginning of the third of the Seth books, titled The "Unknown" Reality. I see from my note on the flyleaf that I purchased this book on 8.8.88.
    I came to the Seth materials reluctantly, even after I moved to upstate New York, not so far from where Jane Roberts had lived and practiced (in the Saratoga area and later in Elmira). I was wary around psychic mediums, perhaps because my great-aunt, the opera singer, had foreseen my death in the tea leaves when I was three years old. She was entirely accurate, by the way; in the words of a doctor in a hospital in the winter that followed, I was a boy who died and came back.
    Then, too, I winced at the slovenly or overly portentous verbiage of much of the channeled material that had come to my attention. Much of it seemed quite lacking in humor or wordcraft.
    It took an intervention to get me to start reading the Seth books. The intervention came embodied by a lively, intelligent woman from Caracas named Romelia. I had met her the previous year in Brazil, where we had investigated the mixology of caipirinhas. On a visit to New York, she called me at the farm to which I had recently moved. Naturally, I invited her to visit. At the end of the long drive to the farm house, she could not wait to cross my threshold before she shouted, "Robert, you must read Jane Roberts!"
    And I did, and I did. I started with Seth Speaks. I was stunned. Here was the clearest model I had so far found for the nature of the self and the conditions for reality creation in the multiverse. I could have done without all the interruptions to the text (as we are told that Jane paused to smoke a cigarette, for example) but nonetheless the voice came through, bold and clear. 

Who is Seth? In describing himself, he prefers not to use the word “spirit”. He jokes that he is a “ghost writer”. He says, “I am an energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical matter...     To write this book…I adopt from my own bank of past personalities those characteristics that seem most appropriate.” He can communicate through Jane Roberts because she is a "window". Within her psyche is “what amounts to a transparent dimensional warp that serves almost like an open window through which other realities can be perceived.”

    Where is Seth based? Not in what we think of as the afterlife. “You must die many times before you enter into this particular plane of existence.”

    The plot thickens when Seth starts speaking of an entity called, for convenience, Seth Two, a personality operating on a level above his. Jane Roberts speculates  that “Seth may be as much of a creation as his book is.” A form of the Speaker generated by a multidimensional intelligence to communicate in her time, and ours.
     As a former journalist, I am trained and disposed to check on the reliability of any source. But the true test for a source of this kind is the quality of the material that comes through. And the Seth material is extraordinary. 

    Seth is one of the really great dream educators. He is crystal clear about the important things that go on in dreaming. Consciousness travels outside the body, every night, in dreams. Dreaming, we travel to other realities, no less real (maybe more so) than the physical world.  Dreaming, we choose from an infinity of probable events those which will become physical. As we become conscious dreamers, we can not only shape reality on other planes, but can engage in reality creation on the physical plane. Thus:

“You can learn to change your physical environment by learning to change and manipulate your dream environment.” 

“Each of you intrudes into other systems of reality in your dream states” 

“This sleeping self of yours is far more knowledgeable than the waking self of which you are so proud.” 

“As there is continuity in your daily life, so there is continuity in your sleeping life...Dreams are no more hallucinatory than your waking life is. Your waking physical self is the dreamer, as far as your dreaming self is concerned. You are the dreamer it sends on its way. Your daily experiences are the dreams that it dreams.” 

Before long I was dreaming my own version of Seth. He looked like a knobby Dutch or Scandinavian publican, who might have spent time at sea, and I drew him looking like that. Years later, when I saw a picture of Seth by Jane Roberts’ husband Rob Butts, I was struck by the strong resemblance.

     I became content to respond to the Seth material channeled by Jane Roberts according to its inherent quality, without asking many questions about the source.
     As I listen to Seth again, I am again thrilled by the simplicity and vital importance of his key statements. Re-read the one that opens this post. This goes to the heart of what it means to be a conscious citizen of the multiverse.
     I was interested to find a detailed account by Jane Roberts in a 1976 essay of what it was like to be speaker for The "Unknown" Reality. She described the book as the product of “an inner psychic ‘combustion’ – the spark that is lit in our world, as Seth’s reality strikes mine – or vice versa." She said that in her trance of transmission she entered "a higher state of wakefulness rather than the sleep usually associated with trance – but a different kind of wakefulness, in which the usual world seems to be sleeping.” This type of trance brought "a feeling of inexhaustible energy, emotional wholeness, and subjective freedom.” In a striking attempt to define her relationship with Seth, she added, “I think I’m alive in Seth’s subjective ‘body’ in the same way that one of my cells is alive in my physical body.” 

Portrait of Seth by Robert F. Butts
    

When the dead hold seances for the living

I find myself drawn, again and again, into the world of the Victorian spirit hunters, especially that great and eloquent pioneer of psychic research and psychology, Frederic (F.W.H.) Myers, and his famous American friend William James. They joined in a great quest to provide evidence acceptable to science that consciousness can operate outside the body and survives bodily death. They drew to their cause many of the greatest minds of their era, including scientists, physicians, literary giants and a British prime minister.

     There is an amazing moment in one of James's sessions with Leonora Piper, the Boston trance medium James studied and consulted over many years and came to call his "white crow".* She was supposedly communicating on behalf of Richard Hodgson, a great friend of James who had been secretary of the American Society of Psychical Research. Though "tremendously athletic", according to James, Dick Hodgson had died suddenly playing handball, leaving two book projects unfinished - and a half-joking promise that, if he died first, he would communicate from the Other Side and provide evidence of survival.

     James grilled the Hodgson personality over and over, seeking proof positive that it was the dead man talking, through the revelation of personal secrets and codes neither the medium nor the sitter could have known. The demands this approach imposed on Hodgson's memory (assuming it was Hodgson) became ridiculous. Assessing the notes from these long sessions (James conceded) bored him "almost to extinction". 

     But then something will come through that is thrilling even to a skeptical reader more than a century later. Here's what excites me, in the transcript of a "voice-sitting" on May 21, 1906.    Speaking through Mrs Piper, Hodgson tells James that Myers (who died in 1901) is with him:

"Myers and I are also interested in the Society over here. You understand that we have to have a medium on this side while you have a medium on your side, and through the two we communicate with you."

     The "Society" mentioned is the Society for Psychical Research, which was (and is) dedicated to producing evidence of "supernormal" (Myers' phrase) phenomena, including contact between the living and the deceased. Think about the statement made via Mrs. Piper's vocal chords.
     While there is a Society for Psychical Research on this side, there is a similar Society on the Other Side. They, too, hold seances or sittings with mediums. While James is listening to the voice of his dead friend through a speaker for the dead, Hodgson is apparently listening to the voice of his living friend through a speaker for the living. 

     Was this the ultimate folie de grandeur of a psychic charlatan, promoting her own profession - that of medium - to the status of indispensability on the Other Side? I have a notion that this part of the reading, at least, can be trusted. There are sensitives among us who are more able than others to pick up presences and messages from the Other Side. It's not such a stretch to suppose that in the same way, there are people on the Other Side who are better as inter-world communicators than others, and may even have the ability to call spirits of the living for a session with relatives or colleagues who are eager to talk with them.

*  Having concluded that Mrs Piper's communications were for real, even though the sources could not be determined beyond doubt, William James declared: "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, it is enough if you prove that one crow is white. My white crow is Mrs. Piper." [William James on Psychical Research edited by Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou. New YorK: The Viking Press, 1960, 41]

Image: Portrait of Leonora Piper by Eveleen Myers.

A Victorian Ghost Hunter Reports from the Other Side

I love the Victorian ghost hunters, especially F.W.H. Myers, W.T. Stead, William James and other founders and luminaries of the Society for Psychical Research. They were passionately dedicated to producing evidence of the survival of consciousness after physical death that would meet the scientific standards of their day. They attended séances and tested mediums, bringing their inner skeptics with them while keeping their eyes on the prize: evidence that the soul has a life beyond the body. In that cause, the ghosts they tracked were not only spirits of the deceased but “phantasms of the living”, a phrase that became the title of a hefty study of the mobility of consciousness and paranormal phenomena including poltergeist activity and sightings of doppelgangers.
    Stead was also a social reformer and a very active editor and reporter, dubbed “the first investigative journalist” because of his role in exposing scandals that lifted the tablecloths from the dirty legs of Victorian society. He developed considerable personal psychic powers of the kind that Myers called "supernormal". He claimed to communicate with his assistant by telepathy. For five years he practiced channeled writing in front of invited groups at his home in Wimbledon, bringing through a description of life on the Other Side by a young woman friend, Julia Ames, after her early death.
 

Stead was among the passengers on the Titanic, and drowned when the supposedly unsinkable luxury cruise ship hit an iceberg in 1912. One of the curious facts of his life is that twenty years earlier, Stead had published a short story in which a ship called the Majestic hits an iceberg. Stead called the captain of the Majestic Smith; the Titanic was commanded by a Captain Smith. This seems to have been a case of precognitive fiction, though Stead evidently failed to make the connection when he boarded the doomed ship.
    Stead promised family and friends that after he died, he would endeavor to communicate from the other side with first-hand information about what life is like there. Stead – or an intelligence operating in his name – succeeded brilliantly in a beautiful little book called The Blue Island: Experiences of a New Arrival Beyond the Veil. It was channeled by male mediums in the presence of Stead’s daughter, who provided the psychic link to her father.

      Stead begins his account, in a brisk, no-nonsense way, by describing what it’s like to be a new arrival on the other side. The beginning was choppy – first hundreds of bodies in the water, then hundreds of souls being carried through the air, some very reluctantly, still fighting and struggling to hold onto their physical possessions.  “We seemed to rise vertically into the air at terrific speed.”  They travel for an uncertain length of time and come to a place of “brightness” where they are received by old friends and relations. At first everything appears as “physical and quite as material” as on earth. 

     Stead’s father and an old friend welcome him and show him around. “It was like nothing else so much as merely arriving in a foreign country and having a chum to go around with.”

    The life just passed now seems very different, as if fifty years have whizzed by. No sense of grief at this stage.

    There are a couple of anomalies. One is that Stead’s father looks much younger than he did at the time of his death. Another is the quality of the light that suffuses everything. It is “a light shade of a deep blue.” 

    Stead and his companions walk along a beautiful deserted beach to a huge domed building whose interior is a lovely shade of blue. And Stead is seized with the desire to write again. His father explains over a delicious lunch that Stead realizes he does not actually need that this building is a way station, “a temporary rest house” – one of many – constructed to resemble earth conditions and cushion the adjustment to the other side. In this phase, individuals are able to engage or indulge in whatever activities please them, since “the chief work on this island is to get rid of unhappiness at parting from earth”. You can swim or read or ride. After a while, activities that are rooted in physical rather than mental or creative experience will begin to pall, but creative individuals and thinkers will find tremendous opportunities opening to them.

    In this phase, life is amazingly similar to life on earth. “We are only a very little way from earth, and consequently up to this time we have not thrown off earth ideas.”  For example, people lie down to “sleep” out of habit, even though sleep is no longer required in this permanent dream state. And they continue to dress and occupy bodily forms resembling those on earth. It’s a phase of gradually shedding old habits and addictions and yearnings for physical life.

    When an individual has reached the point of actively desiring new learning and growth, “he will be drawn like a piece of steel to a magnet, into contact with this or that house or organization dealing with the subject on which he desires knowledge.” Now the departed person is going to school – perhaps a whole succession of schools.

   One of the things you get to learn here your thoughts are actions and “accomplished things” here. You’ll do far better if you arrived with some prior experience of monitoring the contents of your mind and choosing the thoughts to which you gave energy and attention. “There are so many thoughts possible, and all of them are registered here.” 

    Not surprisingly, given Stead’s vigorous interest in communication between the living and the dead while he was among the living, it does not take him long to start checking out communications options on the other side. This produces one of the most interesting sections of his afterlife tour. He cautions that there is no sense of time as it is experienced on earth, so the departed may not understand that they have been on the other side for years or decades – or alternatively only for hours or days – when they start communicating with survivors.

    Stead describes a communications center, “an amazingly well organized and businesslike place” constantly filled with ex-physicals. “Those who had on earth believed and those who had not, came to try and wire a message home.” The ones who feel a “heart call” always get priority. When Stead’s turn came, he was surprised that there was no gee-whiz equipment, “all and only the human element”. A “man of some importance” explains the system to him.

They had a system of travelers, whose work was very close to physical earth. They had the power of sensing people who could and would be used for this work at the other end. 

    Stead, ever the intrepid correspondent, tries various ways to get his messages back to survivors and file his stories. In his first efforts to get through, he has a helper. They enter a room that seems to have walls made of muslin. With the aid of the “official”, Stead discovered he can see and move through these curtain walls. Stead sees and hears several people gathered for a séance. The official teaches him that he can make his presence known by visualizing himself among these people in a physical form, and then imagine that a strong light is cast over him. He fails on his first try. But he practices and practices until he makes an impression, and some of the sitters see him. Then he practices repeating a message until one of the sensitives picks it up and says it out loud.

    He discusses how the living can reach to the departed in a similar way. You concentrate on an individual in the spirit world, and if you put enough energy into that thought, the individual you have in mind will feel you and you may be able to open a communications channel. “We are practically always able to come in close contact with the person who is thinking of us.”

Anyone who sits for a moment and allows his mind to dwell on some dear one who has “died” will actually draw the spirit of that person to himself. He may be conscious or unconscious of the presence, but the presence is there.

    The unknowing receiver may pick up a tremendous flow of inspiration and information he may think is his own, even while dazzled by the quantity and quality of what is streaming in.

    He describes the sadness of the departed who find that their survivors refuse to understand that they are alive. They will break off efforts to communicate if their survivors persist in regarding them only as dead – and wait for their loved ones to join them.

     There are lands beyond the Blue Island – travel to them is like traveling among the stars. These are the Real World; the Blue Island is a transient environment, a place of acclimatization. In the world beyond it, people create homes or palaces for themselves according to taste – but can lose them if they don’t progress.

      One stage that cannot be avoided is the life review. “Each one is interviewed by one of the Advanced Spirit Instructors and the whole record of earth is discussed and analyzed”. An individual may now be required to live for a time in renewed contact with people on the earth plane “in order, by influence, to make good for our past misdoings” 

    In a later progression, the spirit enters what Stead calls the Return Or Stay Sphere where reincarnation may become an option. We have greater or lesser degrees of choice in such matters according to how successful (or otherwise) we have been in cleansing ourselves of guilt and fear and in developing into a deeper understanding of what all of this is about – which is love and courage and growth and creation.

Part of this article is adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

Back to Seth

There is one God, but within that God are many. There is one self, but within that self are many. There is one body, in one time, but the self has other bodies in other times. All “times” exist at once.

The voice is that of Seth, the "energy personality essence" channeled by Jane Roberts. We are near the beginning of the third of the Seth books, titled The "Unknown" Reality. I see from my note on the flyleaf that I purchased this book on 8.8.88.
    I came to the Seth materials reluctantly, even after I moved to upstate New York, not so far from where Jane Roberts had lived and practiced (in the Saratoga area and later in Elmira). I was wary around psychic mediums, perhaps because my great-aunt, the opera singer, had foreseen my death in the tea leaves when I was three years old. She was entirely accurate, by the way; in the words of a doctor in a hospital in the winter that followed, I was a boy who died and came back.
    Then, too, I winced at the slovenly or overly portentous verbiage of much of the channeled material that had come to my attention. Much of it seemed quite lacking in humor or wordcraft.
    It took an intervention to get me to start reading the Seth books. The intervention came embodied by a lively, intelligent woman from Caracas named Romelia. I had met her the previous year in Brazil, where we had investigated the mixology of caipirinhas. On a visit to New York, she called me at the farm to which I had recently moved. Naturally, I invited her to visit. At the end of the long drive to the farm house, she could not wait to cross my threshold before she shouted, "Robert, you must read Jane Roberts!"
    And I did, and I did. I started with Seth Speaks. I was stunned. Here was the clearest model I had so far found for the nature of the self and the conditions for reality creation in the multiverse. I could have done without all the interruptions to the text (as we are told that Jane paused to smoke a cigarette, for example) but nonetheless the voice came through, bold and clear.
    Before long I was dreaming my own version of Seth. He looked like a knobby Dutch or Scandinavian publican, who might have spent time at sea, and I drew him looking like that. Years later, when I saw a picture of Seth by Jane Roberts’ husband Rob Butts, I was struck by the strong resemblance.
     I became content to respond to the Seth material channeled by Jane Roberts according to its inherent quality, without asking many questions about the source.
     As I listen to Seth again, I am again thrilled by the simplicity and vital importance of his key statements. Re-read the one that opens this post. This goes to the heart of what it means to be a conscious citizen of the multiverse.
     I was interested to find a detailed account by Jane Roberts in a 1976 essay of what it was like to be speaker for The "Unknown" Reality. She described the book as the product of “an inner psychic ‘combustion’ – the spark that is lit in our world, as Seth’s reality strikes mine – or vice versa." She said that in her trance of transmission she entered "a higher state of wakefulness rather than the sleep usually associated with trance – but a different kind of wakefulness, in which the usual world seems to be sleeping.” This type of trance brought "a feeling of inexhaustible energy, emotional wholeness, and subjective freedom.” In a striking attempt to define her relationship with Seth, she added, “I think I’m alive in Seth’s subjective ‘body’ in the same way that one of my cells is alive in my physical body.” 
    

Photo collage; Jane Robert with portrait of Seth by her husband Robert Butts