Ask Seth
1929 – 1984
What is this?
Ask Seth lets you have a conversation with the Seth Material — the 1,500+ trance sessions the writer Jane Roberts delivered between 1963 and 1984. Ask anything in plain language and you get a reply in Seth's own voice, built entirely from his actual words, with every idea traceable to the exact book and session it came from. You can also search the books directly, or read any of them start to finish.
Who is Seth?
Seth described himself as an “energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical matter.” Beginning in December 1963, he spoke through Jane Roberts while she sat in a trance — a calm, witty, expansive voice that her husband, the artist Robert Butts, transcribed word for word. Over 21 years he dictated thousands of pages of philosophy, usually addressing the reader directly: “You create your own reality.”
Who was Jane Roberts?
Dorothy Jane Roberts (1929–1984) was an American poet and author from upstate New York. In late 1963, she and Butts experimented with a Ouija board out of curiosity about ESP — and began receiving messages from “Seth.” Within weeks she was speaking his words aloud in trance, no board needed. She never claimed to fully understand what was happening; she wrote poetry and fiction her whole life, but the Seth sessions became her life's work. Her archive — 498 boxes — is held at Yale University Library.
The Seth Material
What emerged is now considered a cornerstone of the modern New Age movement: more than ten major books “dictated” by Seth — among them Seth Speaks (1972), The Nature of Personal Reality (1974), and The Unknown Reality (1977–79), each richly annotated by Butts. Its recurring ideas:
- You create your own reality — your beliefs, expectations and emotions shape what you experience.
- Consciousness comes first — mind isn't produced by matter; matter is formed by consciousness.
- Probable realities — every choice you don't take is lived out by a “probable self.”
- The point of power is in the present.
- All That Is — an infinite, creative consciousness, not a distant God.
The 1970 release “launched an era of nationwide awareness” of channeling. Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Louise Hay, and Richard Bach have all credited the Seth books as foundational to their thinking.
How this works the technology
This isn't a chatbot improvising. The complete texts of 14 Seth books — about 1.44 million words were cleaned and split into ~20,000 passages, then turned into mathematical “embeddings” stored in a local vector database. When you ask something, the app finds the passages most relevant to it — by meaning and by keyword — and an AI model writes an answer grounded only in those retrieved passages, in Seth's voice. Then it shows you every source, so you can open the original and check it yourself. If the books never covered something, it tells you honestly instead of making it up.
A personal study tool. The Seth Material is © the estate of Jane Roberts. Texts sourced from the public Internet Archive.