From Another Psyche: The Other Consciousness of A Speculative American Mystic (The Life and ...

249 Pages·2011·1.14 MB·English

by  Peter Skafish

UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
From Another Psyche: The Other Consciousness of A Speculative American Mystic (The Life
and Work of Jane Roberts)
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Skafish, Peter William
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2011

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From Another Psyche: The Other Consciousness of a Speculative American Mystic (The
Life and Work of Jane Roberts)
by
Peter William Skafish

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of

Joint Doctor of Philosophy
with the University of California, San Francisco

in

Medical Anthropology

in
The Graduate Division
of
The University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:
Professor Stefania Pandolfo, Chair
Professor Lawrence Cohen
Professor Niklaus Largier
Professor Catherine Malabou
Professor Ian Whitmarsh

Spring 2011
© Copyright Peter Skafish.
Abstract
From Another Psyche: The Other Consciousness of a Speculative American Mystic (The
Life and Work of Jane Roberts)
by
Peter Skafish
Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the University of California, San Francisco in Medical
Anthropology
The University of California, Berkeley
Professor Stefania Pandolfo, Chair

This dissertation attempts to develop the beginnings of a new approach to
understanding the significance of modes of thought marginal and/or external to those of the
modern West. I call this approach an “anthropology of concepts” because it examines
concepts and themes belonging to scriptural, “philosophical,” and poetic traditions as concepts
rather than, as normally happens in anthropology, in the context of social practices, historical
events, or everyday life. I also call it this because it accordingly involves the close reading and
interpretation of the written or oral texts in which concepts are articulated. Concepts, when
treated this way, retain their capacity to bring about novel understandings of the real, and to
engender thereby theoretical perspectives not attainable through more conventional
interpretive means. Such an approach may be necessary if the humanities and social sciences
are to continue to hold a critical perspective on a world so enclosed that gaining any distance
from its basic schemes of thought has become extremely difficult.
The present dissertation undertakes such an “anthropology of concepts” in order to
elaborate what I intend to be a new theory of the psyche and consciousness. Popularly
regarded as one of the founders of the New Age spirituality of the United States, Jane
Roberts (1925-1984) was a “channel” (a kind of spirit medium) and visionary mystic who
published in the 1960’s and 1970’s over twenty books that she understood to have been
dictated or written through her by different spiritual beings, including one she called “Seth.”
Although these texts were crucial to the popularization of Western occult ideas about
reincarnation, magic, and health that were at the heart of the New Age, Roberts’s intellectual
curiosity and background as an author of science fiction give her writings a speculative,
intellectually reflexive, and even manifestly ontological tone that is reminiscent of certain
mystical thinkers and that sets them apart from popular religious discourse.
My engagement with Roberts’ writings focuses, first of all, on the concepts she and
her cohort of personalities articulated in the course of addressing what was for her the most
pressing question raised by the decades she spent channeling: how could her experience
during her trances of being herself and another self in the same instant of time be possible?
Her answer was that such an experience—what she called “other-consciousness”—occurs
not through language but when the subject sees itself in the non-sensory, mental images of
dreams and the imagination. She was right in the sense that such images, as Jean-Paul Sartre
makes clear in Psychology of the Imagination, allow two aesthetic figures or persons to appear as
one. My argument is that her claim is significant for showing, surprisingly enough, that
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contrary to what French philosophy claimed for decades, the other can be brought into and
made part of consciousness without being appropriated and consciousness therefore takes a
radically altered form. The baseline consciousness of oneself, that is, changes from
apperception to a consciousness of oneself as both oneself and another—and even of
oneself as a plurality of selves.
To make this point, I read concurrently with Jane Roberts’ texts the work of
Deleuze, showing that she raised in her own fashion some of the same questions about
being, time, and the subject as he did, but that the strange context in which she thought led
her to furnish significantly different—and now for us, novel—responses to them. Given that
a subject that would be at once itself and another would also be both what it actually is and
what it otherwise only could have been, I furthermore show how Roberts’ work allows one
to rethink the Deleuzean (and by implication deconstructive) understandings of the
categories of actuality and possibility and another concept—time—to which they are
integrally tied. The fact that her writings provide a basis for recasting the thought of such a
comprehensive philosopher on matters this fundamental is an indication, I think, of the
broad value an anthropology of concepts could hold for humanistic research.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The debts incurred in the course of thinking and writing are incalculable, but the
people to whom one owes them are not unidentifiable—especially when they have become
an integral aspect of one’s own (necessarily borrowed) consciousness. I would like to thank
Lawrence Cohen for the wisdom, breadth of knowledge, and graceful criticism he offered
while engaging this work and through the different phases of my intellectual development;
Niklaus Largier, for showing interest in my research and for taking it seriously as a project
on religion; and Ian Whitmarsh, for reading and commenting in an insightful fashion on a
late version of this manuscript.
To Catherine Malabou, I owe first of all the chance she gave a project as heterodox
and as at first inchoate as mine; to have seen, as a philosopher, philosophical possibility in
such a strange location required a balance of openness and rigor that I have sought to
emulate. I am also grateful to her for a body of teaching and writing that transformed my
thinking; for demonstrating so well the art of theoretical invention and encouraging my own
attempt at it; and for a friendship that sustained me and gave me the courage to go on. I
hope the book that emerges from this dissertation will appear to her as a metamorphosis of
her own thought, and that she can already see an aspect of her own consciousness at work in
my own. My deepest thanks to you.
Stefania Pandolfo knows the profound difference she made early on in my thinking
and writing: I would have never found my way had she not first shown me the road. She also
knows, probably better than I, how much the anthropology I engage in here is in fact an
approach on loan from her. So much about this text—its narrative dimension, its object, its
conceptual approach—comes from her, and would have never emerged had she not
cultivated the ethos of writerly ingenuity and intellectual intensity that is her own. The
excesses and failures of this text remain my responsibility, but whatever successes it contains
stem from her rare spirit. I will be happy if she feels that her own work on “other psyches”
furthered here.
Diana Anders’ friendship and care were unfailing, even during her darkest hours;
Jean Lave reminded me the whole way that dissidence is often the breath of intellectual life;
and Fawn Moran opened me to an experience of myself that brought me forever out of “the
same” and gave me the insights behind my thoughts.
The friendship and dialogue of Saul Mercado, Yves Winter, Katherine Lemons,
Cindy Huang, Nima Bassiri, Patrice Bone, and Alexei Gostev were essential at different
points during my time at Berkeley, and the teaching of Paul Rabinow and Pheng Cheah
brought me into form so that I could better go out of it. Paul Rabinow deserves special
recognition for creating an atmosphere of rigor, seriousness, freedom, and tension in
Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology; without it, my work would have had nowhere to
grow. Bill Hanks and Donald Moore gave me generous encouragement along the way, and
Claude Imbert first taught me how anthropology and philosophy can be effectively joined.
My parents, Peter and Linda Skafish, were there for me during my worst moments,
and I trust they can see that their intelligence and kindness is alive in this text. My sister,
Beth Skafish, gave me her complicity and love at every turn.
I would like to dedicate this work to Vivian Chen. Your warmth, patience, fidelity,
and love during the time of its writing made everything possible, and the uniqueness of your
perspective changed how I see the world. I hope the image of the self I pursue here is as rich
as your own vision, and that my gratitude is able to reach you.

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——INTRODUCTION——

GOD AS AN EVENT, A DECENTRALIZED GOD—THE GOD OF JANE

Hers was an everything-God, a God everywhere and in all things while nowhere
rising completely out of it all, “A DECENTRALIZED GOD” not culminating in some ultimate,
scarcely encountered ontological peak or resting altogether and terrifyingly outside (as a
mysterious nothing) the parts of the real encompassed by human purview, the God(s) of “A
DEMOCRACY OF SPIRIT” putting “an end to divine hierarchies” (“no one person or group or
dogma or book can presume to speak [of it] in absolute terms”) since its God is nothing else
besides all the “VERSIONS OF GOD” that each of the real’s instances (and every “vision” of these)
are, and thus also a “God” that “would be dispersed throughout creation,” “wouldn’t be confined to one
people or nation or species”—“each creature, each life whatever its degree would have its right as an
expression of” it—and that would therefore be nowhere in charge of or able to hierarchize or
completely organize and arrange itself: it would just be “MULTIPLE,” or “many gods” and
“multiple worlds.”
Inseparable from and never in the end transcending all this diversity, her God—God
as it all, God as just this or that—also had, then, to be thoroughly temporal, a “God that
must still be happening,”1 “GOD AS AN EVENT,”2 God when God, while still remaining in
some way an “origin,” heads so far into time that “TIME STRUCTURES”—“EVENTS” so
singular that “not even a god could get inside them”3—transform it from a first, generative
“source” into the “uniqueness” of its manifestation as each occurrence of each thing, and
the capacity of these to create, to make “creativity constantly continue.”4
Her “GOD AS EVENT,” God cum all such events, is a God whose “actualizations” are
“inventions” or “new versions” of the prior, “greater models” of them first come from itself
(as an older sort of God) since “their own originality alters the models even while their
existence arises from them” so that the “models of themselves… are constantly changing,” all things
end up “unique variations of themselves,” and God, because as much itself and the models as all
these versions, turns out to be “ORIGINAL ECCENTRICITY,”5 the decenteredness of “classical
models” perpetually altered into and by “fantastic eccentrics” which themselves then play the
role of “classical models”6 such that “the son is the father of his father in quite as valid as a way as he
is the son, and vice versa.”7 A God or bunch of “gods” inseparable from the singular instants in
which they take place, from events as what happen just once and that in doing so change and
subordinate what makes them. Her event(s)-God, “whatever this God is…” therefore “is not
static or unchanging”—not “perfect beyond all change or fulfillment, almost like a senile god with nowhere to

1 Jane Roberts, Adventures in Consciousness: An Aspect Psychology Book (Needham, Massachusetts: Moment Point
Press, 1999 [1975]), 158. Hereafter cited as AC.
2 AC, 157.
3 AC, 190.
4 Jane Roberts, The ‘Unknown’ Reality, Volumes One and Two: A “Seth” Book (San Rafael: Amber-Allen Publishing,
1996 [1977-1979]), 518. Hereafter cited as UR.
5 UR, 517.
6 UR, 519.
7 UR, 516. 
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go but down…”8 but a god, instead, that “surprises” itself, and where (spiritual) “psychic and historic
events fuse and henceforth cannot be separated.”9
The gods-God that was hers—and that, as an expression of it, she was in part
making up (all versions of God being, as such, “god-makers”10 through inevitably engaging,
as further divine actualizers or “makers,” in more “god-making”11)—this God not only
undoes the basic, originary and creative, ontological status still almost universally attributed
God or the ultimate by its (Jewish-Christian-Islamic-Hindu) faithful but even blurs the line
between potential and actual. Since this God, again, and each of its parts or PSYCHES can
never finally be distinguished from their instantiations or variations, actualities (which then
lack essences or forms proper to them) are likewise not discrete in relation to each other:
one thing, under such a God, can actually “be” another.
This “God” that is no longer really God was indeed so much her own (things have
probably never quite been put this way) that she gave it her name. “THE GOD OF JANE,” this
“GOD-IN-CAMOUFLAGE”12 (it only “appears within the camouflage of the world itself”13),
because it nowhere draws all of itself back together and can only for that reason be
conceived from the perspectives of each of its myriad parts, this God had to be hers and, in
that way, hers alone. “An appeal to that God would be an appeal to that portion of the
universal creativity from which we personally emerge… that otherwise inconceivable intersection
between Being and our being,”14 “and in those terms, I thought, we do have a personal God, no
matter who—or what—we are: the God of Joe, the God of Lester, the God of Sarah…”15
“The God of Jane,” too, because “we haven’t been free to form any new conceptions of
divinity” for so long (“any new visions of God seem to be blasphemy”) that she still stands
virtually alone in realizing that “in reshaping our gods, we reshape ourselves.”16
Jane’s God, or as she also put it, “CONCEPT OF BEING,” was so indelibly her own
that it really was an event and cannot, as that, be even halfway extricated from her words, the
peculiar circumstances of their articulation, and the entirety of the life these comprised. This
speculative “God” was thus first of all, as is probably by now evident, a mystic’s god—but
that of a mystic, by this Jane’s own reckoning, of a quite singular kind.
“I’ve never,” she would write, “had that kind of mystical experience, so lauded by
many, in which a Jane dissolves into God.”17 Instead of the experiences of union, divine
presence, transcendence, silence, and no-self at the heart of the mystical traditions of the
West, hers (closer to those of some of the feminine mystics, whether men or women) were
visions, tactile anomalies, and even feelings of merger with things besides herself: “I became
transfixed… [by] a piece of crumpled newspaper that kept blowing in the wind… I was
kinetically part of its flights…”18 There was also glossolalia, the babbled, nonsensical

8 Jane Roberts, The God of Jane (Moment Point Press: Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2000 [1981]), 236.
Hereafter cited as GOJ.
9 GOJ, 237.
10 GOJ, 199.
11 GOJ, 196.
12 AC, 158.
13 AC, 159.
14 GOJ, 61.
15 GOJ, 63.
16 GOJ, 65.
17 AC, 158-159. “But I do believe,” she continues, “that God ‘dissolves’ in all his beings, and that we rise into
consciousness and song because our individuality is part of any God-head.”
18 AC, 82. 
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composite of various languages that prophets or the spiritually inspired resort to (much
more than do mystics) in order to express the inexpressible, sightings of the future, and
apparent journeys outside her body. Most importantly, Jane’s foremost passion—the specific
kind of passivity and receptivity through which her intersectional “God” could occur as
her—was possession, the takeover and displacement of oneself by what could be called “the
spirit of another,” a mode of ecstasy the mystical traditions and their Eastern counterparts
usually frowned upon (at least officially) and kept at their periphery. For her, though, God
arrived that way, as the event—the anomalous, untenable, at first barely perceptible
happening—of a trance, where a big “fragment” of a God all bits and pieces (“all things” the
fragment said, “are in a sense fragments”) showed itself; when something that felt like a vast
intelligence and immaterial power (what felt like a god) spoke instead of and as her, and took
form in her as a persona or alter-ego who called itself “SETH.”
Her own God—this little “god,” herself, their intersection, and some other swathes
of the real they reached into—was nonetheless a mystic’s in a more familiar sense. Apart
from being a visionary and a medium or channel (the latter being a term she helped invent),
she was someone given, as so many mystics were, to writing, and to the mixing together in it
of poetry, autobiography, visionary description, instruction in spiritual technique, quasi-
philosophical thinking, and even fiction characteristic of their tradition. A would-be poet in
adolescence who later earned herself a claim to a writer’s identity when she published a
science fiction novel and some short stories in her late twenties, she was incapable of
refraining from offering literary and sometimes poetic accounts of her ecstasies, of seeking a
reading public for them, and of keeping them pure of the veridical and characterological
promiscuity of the sort of language people who write keep company with. The
autobiographical accounts of her visionary itinerary fill four published volumes (The Seth
Material, Adventures in Consciousness, Psychic Politics, and The God of Jane), but her most popular
works were the results of the fact that her mysticism was so much a writerly one that what it
allowed her to think came mostly in the (transcribed) language of her trances and the other
person she morphed into during them. In fact, Seth Speaks, The Unknown Reality, The Individual
and The Nature of Mass Events, and more than seven others titles carrying the imprint “A Seth
Book” on their covers attest to just how indissociable for her the ecstasies of writing and
language were from spiritual rapture: a quasi-fictional character or literary-psychological
daimon, they show, was as important to her as God itself, and language was so free and
mobile in her work that the latter elaborates new perspectives on the matters it discusses
without always bothering to reconcile or clear up the possible contradictions or logical
relations between them.
This odd mysticism, though, was not only or even primarily writerly (or
grammatological) and the claims about the real that came out of it accordingly not just the
tracks of language gone off the rails. “I questioned them incessantly,” she wrote of her
experiences. “Intuitively I was intrigued, but intellectually I was scandalized” by them—
being “critical,” “skeptical,” and “experimental,” “something had to expand in my concepts”
if they were to make sense.19 Her visions and channeling usually, in fact, turned out to be
responses to her questions, the verbal answers turning increasingly intellectual until they
effectively amounted to a “conceptual framework,” “speculation,” and a “metaphysics”—a “body of
theory,” as she also put it, whose profuse neologisms, unique phrases, and rerouted terms
(“concepts”) arose more from her surprising fluency in the still uncodified art of formulating

19 AC, 4. 
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questions, the naked and innocent wonder its practice requires, and her strange intellectual
strength than the fact she had constant, easy, and literally mediumistic access to language’s
power to write itself out. In other words, she had a strange penchant and strange
commitment to the even stranger work of thinking, and this led her, as it did so many of the
old mystics, to an experience of “God” almost as intellectual as it was immediate, the endless
road of conceiving and specifying it, and thus right into something much like philosophy.
So “THE GOD OF JANE” was a conceptual and nearly philosophical God that often
revealed itself only through concepts, sequences of thought, their literary illustrations, or,
more simply, words. Yet it nonetheless was, again, a “God” so much her own that its
thinking never happened outside her life and constant reference to it. There was always,
occurring alongside it, this one JANE ROBERTS, born in 1928 in Sarotoga Springs, New York
to a disabled, possibly psychotic working-class woman (“a bedridden, arthritic invalid… one
day my mother would say that she loved me, and the next day she’d scream that she was
sorry I’d ever been born—that I’d ruined her life”20) whom she would, for much of her
youth, care for and attend to (“I was up with her half the night for years, to give her the
bedpan, fix her pillows, obey reasonable and unreasonable demands, and fill the oil burner,
which always ran out of fuel around 4 A.M.”21) before crossing her small town, on
scholarship, for one Skidmore College, proto-feminist politics, her apprenticeship as a writer,
and, after that, a cross-country escape from her past (“I left for California with a fellow
student… who had a motorcycle…”22), an eventual return to upstate New York, and, much
later, a vision that would change everything (“between one normal minute and the next, a
fantastic avalanche of radical, new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force, as if my
skull were some sort of receiving station, turned up to unbearable volume”23)… But only
after her collision some years prior with ROBERT BUTTS, a painter ten years her senior and
decades her intellectual junior whom she wed in 1954 (“I knew that Rob was for me the
minute I met him”24) and who became the constant accomplice to her mysticism by sitting
down for thrice-weekly “sessions”—think séance-cum-working meeting—where he would
transcribe the discourses of the oracle she became for-as-with-through-in her “god”… one
SETH, a sort of maverick, intellectual demigod residing outside time (after a successful run of
terrestrial incarnations) and lecturing via telepathic hookup in baritone, absurdly accented
English; he also was, more profoundly (according to one of his most succinct self-
descriptions), “someone, on the one hand, you do not know, lost in the annals of the past
and the future as you understand them” while also, “on other hand, I am yourself…”25
There was, too, ELMIRA, NEW YORK, an early casualty of deindustrialization (“a depressed

20 “She blamed me for the death of her mother who went out one evening to buy me shredded wheat for
supper and was killed in an automobile accident. I was six. She also blamed me for the death of our favorite
housekeeper, who died of a stroke in my arms when I was thirteen, right after the three of us had an argument.
My mother would often stuff her mouth with cotton and hold her breath, pretending that she was dead, to
scare me when I was small. In years later, when I was in grade school and high school she’s threaten suicide,
sometimes saying that she’d also mail a letter to the police stating that I’d murdered her. And she did attempt
suicide four or five times.” GOJ, 38.
21 GOJ, 41.
22 GOJ, 42.
23 Jane Roberts, Seth Speaks (San Rafael: Amber-Allen Publishing, 1996), 5.
24 GOJ, 43.
25 AC, 14.
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