He wishes to address nothing less than the origins of the universe and of mankind. With this eighth book in the Seth series, our ghostly guru returns once again to these basic messages, but now his scope has become more ambitious. These sorts of ideas may strike scientific-minded readers as absurd, but they’ve been comforting and instructive for many people-among them Shirley MacLaine, who cited the Seth books in “Out on a Limb.” you have lived before and will live again. The Seth books all contain variations on a few central themes common to occult literature. But there is still no definitive, scientific evidence that the phenomena Roberts reported were, in fact, genuine. Her psychic experiences were described by her in a fascinating and credible-sounding way in “The Seth Material,” a book published in 1970 that also featured generous quotations from Seth himself. Jane Roberts first encountered her loquacious spirit-world tutor in 1963, when he allegedly began sending messages through the Ouija board with which she and her husband were playing. Seth is perhaps the most prolific (and soporific) of all these “ghost-writers.”

Hundreds of thousands of readers have apparently found these works inspirational and helpful, despite the suspension of disbelief they require. Years after they died, Jesus, Shakespeare and William James, among others, have all purportedly sought out earth-bound writers to transcribe their thoughts from the afterlife. There are dozens of books that are allegedly composed in whole or in part by personalities “no longer focused in physical reality,” as the Seth books put it. Since 1970, the books Roberts and her husband, Robert Butts, compiled of Seth’s philosophical teachings have been among the most popular of publishing’s most peculiar genre: “channeled” literature.

Seth channeled by jane roberts