Dorothy Jane Roberts (1929-1984) was an American author and poet who gained recognition for her work channeling a personality she identified as 'Seth.' This process, known as the Seth Material, involved Roberts entering a trance state and dictating messages from Seth, with her husband, Robert Butts, acting as stenographer. Before her work with Seth, Roberts experienced a challenging childhood marked by her parents' divorce, her mother's chronic illness and emotional distress, and periods of reliance on public assistance. She pursued a career in writing, publishing poetry, short stories, and other genres, and was the sole woman invited to the first science-fiction writer's conference in 1956.

The phenomenon of the Seth Material began in 1963 when Roberts reported receiving a flood of new ideas, which she initially documented as 'The Physical Universe as Idea Construction.' Shortly after, she and Butts began experimenting with a Ouija board, leading to their first communications with Seth in December 1963. Roberts soon transitioned to directly dictating Seth's messages while in a trance, a practice that continued for over 21 years until her death. Hundreds of people witnessed these channeling sessions, and Roberts also reportedly channeled other historical figures. The Seth Material was published by Prentice-Hall and established Roberts as a significant figure in the field of paranormal phenomena.

Born in Albany, New York, Jane Roberts' early life was shaped by her parents' divorce and her mother's debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. Growing up in Saratoga Springs, she experienced periods of hardship, including reliance on public assistance and the loss of her grandmother. The responsibility of caring for her ill mother, coupled with her mother's emotional negativity and attempts at suicide, significantly impacted Roberts. She also faced personal health issues, including colitis and thyroid problems, and required strong corrective lenses for her poor vision. A period spent in a Catholic orphanage during her mother's hospitalization fostered a strong initial connection to religious beliefs, though she later moved towards a scientific worldview after her grandfather's death. Her early adulthood involved various jobs and marriage, before she met and married Robert Butts, her collaborator in the Seth Material.

In 1963, Roberts experienced a profound shift, describing an 'avalanche of radical, new ideas' that felt like breaking through to infinite dimensions of reality. Initially, neither she nor her husband, Robert Butts, believed in extrasensory abilities, despite her fiction often exploring such themes. Their curiosity led them to experiment with a Ouija board for research purposes, which, according to them, resulted in coherent messages from a personality identifying as Seth on December 2, 1963. Roberts soon began hearing Seth's messages directly and transitioned from using the Ouija board to dictating the material while in a trance state. This process, which she described as Seth controlling her body and speaking through her, became the foundation for the Seth books.

Roberts described her channeling process as entering a trance, during which she would speak the messages dictated by Seth, with her husband Robert Butts transcribing them. These sessions, referred to as 'readings,' continued for over 1500 instances over 21 years until Roberts' death in 1984, with a brief interruption due to her final illness. The messages, primarily monologues on diverse subjects, were published by Prentice-Hall under the collective title 'Seth Material.' Hundreds of individuals witnessed Roberts channeling Seth, with some attending 'ESP classes' she held. Roberts also reportedly channeled other figures, such as William James, Rembrandt, and Paul Cézanne, using a process she described as automatic writing on a typewriter.

“Between one normal minute and the next, a fantastic avalanche of radical, new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force ... It was as if the physical world were really tissue-paper-thin, hiding infinite dimensions of reality, and I was flung through the tissue paper with a huge ripping sound.”

“I was doing twice the creative work I had done earlier. I was satisfied with the quality of the Seth Material; it was far superior to anything I could do on my own. If nothing else, I thought the sessions presented a way of making deeply unconscious knowledge available on a consistent basis.”

“Because we were so innocent about psychic literature, we weren't hampered by superstitious fears about such [psychic] phenomena. I didn't believe in gods or demons, so I didn't fear them. I wanted to learn. Rob and I had discovered a whole new world together, and we were going to explore it.”