I had some interest in the paranormal ever since childhood. I remember having one of those dream dictionaries, you know, where you dreamed about underwear so you look up “underwear” and it tells you that it means you need to examine the underside of your life, or something. I remember reading that on the way to church sometimes.

One of my best friends to this day, Paul, I met in middle school, and one of the things we bonded around was our mutual interest in the paranormal. We had this book called Astral Projection, by Denning and Phillips, that, scandalously, had a picture of a naked woman floating up “astrally” from her sleeping, clothed self. (I’m sure that didn’t affect our decision to get it!) It prescribed lots of chakra visualizations, among other things. I never got anything out of it, but it was my first attempt at anything close to magic.

I tried hard to have lucid dreams, too — they’re dreams where you realize you’re dreaming, while you’re still in the dream. I read about them in Omni magazine and had to try them out, and eventually started having them with some frequency.

One day my mom offered to buy me some books out of a Barnes & Noble catalog. I chose a couple. She rejected the one on Masonic conspiracies, but let me buy Out-of-Body Adventures by Rick Stack. (Amusingly, I recall that my motivation for choosing that book wasn’t for any particular reason of paranormal interest; it was because I had a huge crush on a girl who lived out of state, and wanted to be able to visit her.)

That turned out to be quite the turning point for me. I didn’t get that much out of the book itself, but it made repeated reference to the Seth material. So I went to my local library and there were a bunch of books by Seth. I dove in.

Jane Roberts was an author, married to artist Rob Butts, living in upstate New York. In the ’60′s she began having trance experiences that eventually coalesced into a personality speaking through her, in a phenomenon that has since become popularly known as trance channelling. Certainly Jane wasn’t the first, but I think she was one of the most famous modern mediums and since her many have tried to follow in her footsteps.

The “discarnate entity” that spoke through her named itself Seth, and eventually would dictate (as recorded and transcribed by Rob) a number of books describing the nature of reality, which collectively became known as the “Seth material” and became important enough to be archived at Yale.

The basic philosophy could be summed up in one sentence: “You create your own reality.”

The material captured me. Here I was, physically and emotionally entering adolescence, ready for some worldview that reflected my maturation. The Seth material was dense but alive, full of strange new ideas like the notion that God is better thought of as All That Is, that reincarnation occurs but simultaneously rather than linearly, that all people are inherently bisexual, the human potential has barely been tapped, that absolute evil does not truly exist, that Atlantis was real, that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross but that the myth carries more “reality” than actual events, that identity is fluid, that reality is constructed by our beliefs and interpretations — and, that life is full of creativity, joy, and power.

I read through the books thoroughly, I chewed over the concepts, I talked it over with anyone who would listen (which was usually only Paul). It transformed me.

The essence of it was that none of it really sounded new. I felt as though I were merely being reminded of something I had known long ago, but forgotten.

So Seth became my guru. And almost naturally, I found myself less and less interested in being a Christian. I was simply more interested in this approach of working with the building blocks of self and reality, than with the stories and parables and moral lessons and verses of the Christ mythology. And it didn’t help that Seth was critical of Christian concepts like original sin.

I think the Seth material appealed to my sense of personal power, to understand that my beliefs, thoughts, feelings, dreams, and identity directly influenced my experience of reality. It was a more thorough and direct approach.

It was primarily an internal endeavor, an approach of intellectual excavation of my own beliefs and thought patterns. It involved a lot of deep introspection, a lot of self-digestion. It had an effect.

I had an asshole phase of life around eighth to tenth grades. Maybe everyone’s got a phase like this. In eighth grade I discovered hair gel and contact lenses. I became first chair of the middle school orchestra, and at least in that one class I was hot shit — enough for one girl to ask me out and another to moon over me.

I was a Boy Scout, and when I signed up to join a troop that was going to the 1993 National Scout Jamboree, I was chosen to be the Senior Patrol Leader. It was my first major leadership role, I was supposed to oversee some forty Scouts. I seized the opportunity to lord it over everybody else, to yell at people to make them do stuff (even if quietly asking would be more pleasant), and to take advantage of my position and flout some of the same rules that I yelled at everybody else to follow, just because I had the power and thought I had the right.

In high school I entered the debate and forensics team, and was good enough to win a few local awards, and be all arrogant about it. I’m particularly ashamed by something I did to the local punching-bag kid, an overweight boy named Adam. By way of explanation: To open every session of high school policy debate, the first speaker gets up and reads a scripted “case” consisting of observations, arguments, and evidence, and everyone spends the whole rest of the debate trying to prop the case up or tear it apart, depending on which side you’re on. Well, I wrote up and posted on the debate classroom bulletin board a faux “case” against Adam. It viciously listed “observations,” “arguments,” and “evidence” against him. It cracked a lot of people up. It was possibly the single pettiest thing I have ever done, pure meanness with nothing else in it. It was a new low for me and I regret it to this day.

Interestingly, I think it was entirely in keeping with the persona of arrogant debater, that was in turn a part of the debate subculture. That doesn’t excuse my responsibility for the bullying, only explains why I felt I had license to do what I did, and possibly explains why I felt good at the time about doing it — because it did get me some approval among the “cool” debate kids.

That was my first year in debate. The next year the Seth material really started to take hold. I started to soften, to go deeper, to appreciate nuances and explore different angles of life, thought, and feeling — in short, to enter more fully into what was more authentic spiritually.

I didn’t win a single debate or speech award.

And that was the end of my debate career. I found that I simply could not uphold the pugilistic and arrogant persona I needed to have in order to win at debates or to give effective speeches about political situations in Russia. I lost the will to fight. Spirituality became more ensconced front and center, and even affected where I went to college and what I studied.

Other than the Seth material, dream interpretation and lucid dreams were a daily part of my life. Practically the only lucid dream instruction books available at the time were books by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D., who had the distinction of proving to the scientific community that lucid dreams were a scientifically verifiable phenomenon. I read his brief bio in the back of one of his books and saw that he headed a research organization, The Lucidity Institute (whose website has changed remarkably little since 1996), near Stanford University. So that was how I decided to attend Stanford.

The Seth material continued to be the primary influence on my inner life into the first couple of years of college. I intended to double-major in psychology and religious studies, but ended up only doing psychology because a double major is a hell of a lot of work! Nonetheless the choice was deeply influenced by Seth and by my own experiences and fascination with plumbing my own depths as inspired by Seth. My intention at the time was to go on to graduate school in transpersonal psychology, the closest field I could find to anything that sounded Seth-like.

Though Jane Roberts passed in 1984, as I mentioned she spawned a number of imitators or successors, and I had a phone consultation with one of them, named Elias. (And if you’re interested, you can even read the transcript.) It was a unique experience, though not particularly life-changing.

As I write this now, I’m trying to figure out how to describe exactly what effects the Seth material has had on me up to the present moment, but it’s kind of hard they’re so global and also because I’ve since recognized many of the same concepts in many other things I’ve studied. When Seth says that our known reality is a “camouflage reality,” that is not so different from the Buddhist concept of maya, for instance. When he talks about reality existing first in dreams, and constantly being manifested in each moment, that echoes the Kabbalistic idea that Creation is an ongoing process. When he says that our normal identities are in fact connected to a greater self the way characters we might portray in a play are related to us, that echoes a Hermetic concept that essentially says the same thing. It’s hard for me to distinguish between the aspects of my current belief structure that originates with Seth, and the aspects that were accumulated along the way.

So, looking back, the biggest compliment I can give the Seth material is that I have found nothing that really contradicts it, among the many other mystical traditions I’ve sampled. It still rings true to me. While I don’t think of myself as a “Sethian” any longer, it’s probably because there never really was a “Sethism,” there was just his portrayal of an independent reality that others have sought to describe as well.