Seth quoted in Monday, Nov. 13, 1972 Time magazine

[Mark M]

 ...However he feels about marriage, [Richard] Bach is wedded to Jonathan [Livingston Seagull] and to its source of inspiration. Several times while flying, Bach has heard a voice give him a sharp command which he followed on instinct; it saved his life, he insists. Yet he admits to being nervous about acting as a vehicle for what he long thought of as the alien force that gave him Jonathan. Because he believes in most of what the book illustrates he has also been a bit worried that readers would refuse to take it seriously once they knew about its "kooky" origin.

One result has been a soft flirtation with the world of the occult. Bach began by skulking into occult bookstores and sampling the fare. "It took nerve," he recalls, "just to go in one of those places." Since then he has tried a few mediums, but found "all that crystal-ball stuff, spirit guides, music and the darkened rooms" hard to take. Recently, though, he discovered Jane Roberts, a poet and science-fiction writer, who since 1963 has been a conduit for the spoken words of a personality called Seth. "It's all done in daylight," says Bach. "There's just this one small, middle-aged woman in a rocking chair. When Seth speaks, her voice deepens and even the planes of her face seem to change."

Seth, in fact, sounds rather like the former Indian Defense Minister, crotchety Krishna Menon. He proved a great help to Bach. For one thing, he advised Bach not to worry about religions that claim Jonathan is preaching their doctrine. ("The seagull is free. How they think about him you cannot dictate.") He also told Bach that every individual consciousness has many aspects that move freely through time and space. Jonathan was not alien but came from one of Bach's aspects. "Information, then, becomes new and is reborn as it is interpreted through a new consciousness," Seth continued.

Jane Roberts and her husband Robert have recorded 6,800 pages of Seth's talk. Much of it has been put together into two Prentice-Hall books, The Seth Material (1970) and, this fall, Seth Speaks. Whoever he is or is not, Seth speaks with more cogency than most of the troubled spirits that find their way into print. To Bach's relief, the two Seth books outline a cosmology that coincides a good deal with his own way of viewing life and death. Though Bach would hate the labels, the final result, like Jonathan, seems to be a blend of Jung, Christian Science and theosophy. It assumes individuals exist as multidimensional personalities who do not die but simply change consciousness. Explicit too, are the great powers that reside in the individual, if he will only tap them, to evolve and to triumph over matter (and sickness) through thought control. Or, as Jonathan Livingston Seagull puts it: "A seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself."...

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,910460-7,00.html

[Deb]

Thank you.

Those first few words, "However he feels about marriage" cracked me up. I think he was married four times, but still has his little airplane "Puff" which appears in Illusions, Illusions II (both great!) and a couple of other books. I'd say he's really wedded to his plane. 

You can also download a PDF of the article, with images, here. Plus a link to a letter from the publisher.

https://speakingofseth.com/index.php/topic,416.msg3291.html#msg3291