Don’t get me wrong. I’m not for a moment trying to compare myself to Jane Roberts, the amazing lady who channelled and wrote about Seth during the 20th century. She’s been a hero of mine since I first discovered their books, about 15 years ago. Nor am I trying to compare Asher, my co-creator, with Seth.
It’s just that when I was re-reading Jane’s introduction to Seth Speaks, I noticed several similarities between her role and mine. In that introduction, she focusses on her place in the process — how her literary abilities and personality fitted the job, how she struggled to find a suitable way to describe and explain Seth to a potentially sceptical readership, and how she was selected for this task. These were all things I’d often wondered about in my own case, and questions I’ve had to address in the recent podcast and radio interviews I’ve been doing to promote A Mind Beyond Words.
I decided to ask Asher for his comments on how and why he, as a small child in a class I was teaching, selected me to be his assistant. (For anyone not familiar with our story, the tale of how he found me, by means of a series of surprisingly sophisticated ‘tests’, can be found in the second chapter of my book, which you can listen to here.)
This is how Asher responded to my question:
Asher: Your skills and abilities are as specialised, in their own way, as mine. When I devised those initial tests to find you, I was searching for a specific personality: one who had the mental agility to link together the strands of evidence (what I was doing to disrupt the situation), to believe her intuition that a small child was capable of such actions, and to accept my behaviour with a sense of humour and willingness to work within my terms. If you had not possessed all three, you would not have been a good fit. You needed curiosity, too, as you commented in the book.
I went on to ask more about the technicalities of the way he now communicates with me, which vary between monosyllabic text messages on social media to complex and metaphysical telepathic downloads.
Asher: As you’ve been reading in Seth’s works, an individual’s consciousness can enter many states and be available on various levels. There are times when this becomes very much like a channelling experience for you, as I pass on more-or-less pure psychic material directly from The Realms. At other times there are (telepathic) conversations that mirror the way we would talk face to face about these matters, when what you would call ‘banter’ takes place.
I think the easiest way for you to understand it would be to imagine me standing on various rungs of a ladder. I am ‘higher Asher’ at the top and ‘Ash-in-the-body’ at the lower end. Depending on our moods — both of us individually — and the material to come through, I adjust my position on the ladder to create the best vibrational match.
Jes: That’s really clear. Today, for example, you’re on a slightly lower rung than yesterday, when you gave me material that had a more lyrical quality.
Asher: Yes. You see in our particular case — and this is where we vary from the more usual types of channelling — maintaining our personal friendship is an important aspect. You would be less motivated if I was always up at the top of the ladder. It remains important for my personality to be accessible.
Jes: Just to placate me, or is it of importance to both of us to retain that personal link?
Asher: Both of us equally. Our friendship feeds — nourishes — our souls.
He went on to assure me that this ‘nourishment’ extended to his physical, almost silent self, because I am able to give that aspect of himself the care and friendship he needs, while accepting that he is unable to reciprocate at that level.
Back to Seth
Early on in Seth Speaks, Seth comments on how Jane (or Rubert, as he calls her) makes her ‘verbal knowledge available for our use, and quite automatically the two of us cause the various words to be spoken.’ He even talks of how distractions can distort the material that comes through. All that sounded very familiar to me. I was starting to realise that having discovered the Seth Material many years after meeting Asher, but some time before we embarked on our telepathic conversations, had been a necessary part of my ‘education’, giving me a psychological structure within which to work in this way.
(I first encountered Seth, incidentally, when having a psychic reading with a lady who insisted that I needed to track down and read as many Seth books as possible, as they would be of immeasurable help some time in my future.)
Asher, too, had previously mentioned that I’d needed to find Seth as preparation for our work together. I now commented to him that those books must have opened my mind to the possibilities of what we were going to do.
Asher: Indeed they did. You needed those neural pathways, for want of a better term, to open up.
Jes: I want to understand how Seth’s ‘quite automatically’ happens.
Asher: It is, as Seth explains, a merging of intention — my intention to impart knowledge or information and yours to be instrumental in making those ideas available to others via words. I do make use of your personal lexicon and, in rare cases, I am able to extract syllables or similar sounding words that will enable you to find a word, or a meaning of a word, you’ve not been aware of before.
He’s right. That has happened on occasions.
In one recent telepathic discussion about Western society and the socialisation process, the word I picked up from Asher sounded like ‘homogenised’. Initially, I didn’t feel I’d got the right word. As far as I was aware, homogenisation was a process performed on milk, something akin to pasteurisation, and it didn’t feel anything like a fit for what he was conveying. I reached for my phone and checked the word. This is what I got:
- subject (milk) to a process in which the fat droplets are emulsified and the cream does not separate.
- make uniform or similar: “should the role of the law be to homogenize society?”
Needless to say, the second meaning — the one that hadn’t occurred to me and that I don’t think I was even consciously aware of — fitted exactly into the material Ash was giving me.
Asher continued:
Asher: It’s helpful to be able to convey information via a wide range of what could be called ‘astral senses’. The concepts I send to you via various ‘textures’ of perception in an astral envelope may not always be easy for you to comprehend unaided, but having delivered them, I can then work with you because we have a common ground laid out between us, that we build on jointly.
I notice that Seth often provided extra material of this sort to Jane, or even to her husband and scribe Robert, during their sessions. Maybe Asher has learned from Seth. I have certainly learned a great deal from Jane Roberts.