“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The weather has been exceptionally warm this fall—warm and often rainy or misty, but most welcome for this time of year. The trees seem way behind schedule; we’ve seen the first signs of their leaves turning color just recently. The grass has even started growing again, after lying dry and dormant for a long period this summer.

Yesterday morning I heard geese flying south for the first time this season, but they were invisible above a heavy overcast. This afternoon I both heard and saw them, and called them to Jane’s attention—a wide, straggling, shifting, V-shaped flight vanishing over the valley holding the city just below us. The geese looked very vulnerable against the massive roll of the earth beneath them, but this was an illusion: Like every other entity on earth, each one of those birds knew very well what it was doing. Each was well equipped to seek out its individual value fulfillment.

(Pause at 9:56.) Subjectivity still largely ruled. Like an adolescent leaving home for the first time, individualized consciousness was also somewhat homesick, and returned often to the family homestead—but gradually gained confidence and left finally to form a [universe].

Now because All That Is contains within itself such omnipotent, fertile, divine creative characteristics, all portions of its subjective experience attained dimensions of actuality impossible to describe. The thoughts, for example, of All that Is were not simply thoughts as you might have, but multidimensional mental events of superlative nature. Those events soon found that a transformation must occur (pause), if they were to journey into objectivity—for no objectivity of itself could contain the entire reality of subjective events that existed within divine subjectivity. Only in that context could their relative (underlined) perfection be maintained. Yet they had yearned before the beginning for other experiences, and even for fulfillments of a different nature. They sensed a kind of value fulfillment that required of them the utilization of their own creative abilities. They yearned to create as they had been created, and All That Is, in a kind of divine perplexity, nevertheless realized that this had always been its own intent.

We will for now, however, confine ourselves to a discussion of consciousness in the beginning of the world, stressing that the first basis of physical life was largely subjective, and that the state of dreaming not only helped shape the consciousness of your species, but also in those terms served to provide a steady source of information to man about his physical environment, and served as an inner web of communication among all species. End of dictation.

(10:23 P.M. “I don’t know whether it’s going to last or not,” Jane said, “but I’m enjoying this book more than any. I get into a certain state that’s really nice. It’s very rich and deep. Like I know the session wasn’t too long, but I had that sense of completion when he went back incredibly far. It’s satisfying as all shit.”

1. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, I wrote in Note 7 for Session 681 that atoms are “processes” rather than things. The classical conception of the typical atom as being composed of a neat nucleus of indivisible protons and neutrons circled by electrons is largely passé, although for convenience’s sake we may still describe the atom that way. (In those terms, the one exception is the hydrogen atom, which evidently consists of but one proton and one electron cloud, or “smear.”) For the simple purposes of this note, then, I’m leaving out considerations involving quantum mechanics, which concept repudiates the idea of “particles” to begin with. (And surely that notion involves more than a little of the psychic, or “irrational.” What a heretical thought from the scientific viewpoint!) But each atom of whatever element is an amazingly complicated, finely balanced assemblage of forces and particles woven together in exquisite detail—one of the more basic examples of the unending and stupendous creativity, order, and design of nature, or consciousness, or All That Is.

“As their instruments reach farther into the universe they will ‘see’—and I suggest that you put the word ‘see’ into quotes—they will ‘see’ farther and farther, but they will automatically transform what they apparently ‘see’ into the camouflage patterns with which they are familiar. They are and they will be the prisoners of their own tools.

And of course there are all sorts of motion, some of them very stable, if still incomprehensible to us. But whereas the meson vanishes from our view after its exceedingly brief existence, the electron has an “infinite” life-span. Think of the unending varieties of value fulfillment it explores in just our world alone! Talk about motion: The average electron orbits its atomic nucleus about a million times each billionth of a second (or nanosecond)!

At this point in my speculations I’m usually led back to Seth’s EE (or electromagnetic energy) units, and his CU’s (or units of consciousness). These nonphysical entities—and many others of a like nature—are emanations of consciousness, or All That Is, and in “size” rank far below the tiniest particles ever observed in an atom smasher. According to Seth, each unit of consciousness “contains within itself innately infinite properties of expansion, development and organization; yet within itself always maintains the kernel of its own individuality…. It is aware energy … not ‘personified’ but awareized.” See Session 682 for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality.

She began to refer to the eccentricities of consciousness in October 1974, following her first conscious experience with her “psychic library,” and a subsequent transcendental experience in which she suddenly began to see, with an astonishing clear vision, the great “model” of each portion of the world about her—each person, each building, each blade of grass, each bird, for example; our ordinary world suddenly appeared quite shabby by contrast. Jane wrote that “everyone was a classic model, yet each was also a fantastic eccentric…. I saw that each of us is a beloved eccentric not only because we have inner models of the self, but also the freedom to deviate from them, all of which makes the model living and creative in our time.” In Psychic Politics, see chapters 2 and 3.

3. Now what, I wondered, as I typed this session from my notes, does Seth mean here, and in the paragraph above? Sometimes it’s difficult to pinpoint just what he’s saying. His material usually generates more questions than answers, but this time he’d outdone himself. I try to avoid reading too much into such brief passages, but I felt that if Seth answered all of the questions I could ask based upon this session, a book would result. Was he referring to another big-bang type of “momentous explosion”? I doubted it. Without going into a lot of speculative detail, such an event would imply the obliteration of our probable physical universe as we know it. Instead, I thought, by “another form” he may mean an explosion of ideas or knowledge in our reality, with the tremendous objective results that would follow. Such results would stem even from “just” a spiritual explosion. (I could also see correlations here between Seth’s ideas about the primary nature of All That Is and the inflationary model of the universe. See Note 2 for Session 883.)

Since it’s sometimes difficult to be sure of just what Seth is saying, in retrospect I wished that either he’d volunteered more information about his explosion-expansion, or that I’d been quick enough to ask him to do so. But if words are often necessarily limited and stereotyped, they can also be quite elusive—and this is an excellent thing, for it shows they’re still alive, charged with meanings that change. Basically, those meanings can never really be “put into words.”