“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(No session was held last Monday evening, Christmas Eve. Instead, we had a few close friends in; all of us exchanged gifts. After the party was over Jane and I gave each other our own presents. My high point was receiving the little book of poems and sketches she’d made for me. [I hadn’t created anything like that for her, though.] When Jane read her poetry to me I strongly felt once again her innocence and perception: “The universe keeps turning into us….” We had a quiet but very enjoyable Christmas day.

It is not quite as simple a matter as just deciding what events you want to materialize as reality, since you have, in your terms, a body of probabilities of one kind or another already established as the raw materials for the coming year. It would be quite improbable for you, Joseph (as Seth calls me), to suddenly turn into a tailor, for example, for none of your choices with probabilities have led toward such an action.

Your conscious mind can only accept a certain sequence of probabilities as recognized experience. As I have said, the choices among probabilities go on constantly, both on conscious and unconscious levels. Events that you do not perceive as conscious experience are (pause) a part of your unconscious experience, however, to some extent. This applies to the individual, and of course en masse the same applies to world events. Each action seeks all of its own possible fulfillments. All That Is seeks all possible experience, but in such a larger framework in this case that questions of, say, pain or death simply do not apply, though [certainly] they do on the physical level (all quite forcefully).

(9:25.) Great expectations, basically, have nothing to do with degree, for a grass blade is filled with great expectations. Great expectations are built upon a faith in the nature of reality, a faith in nature itself, a faith in the life you are given, whatever its degree—and all children, for example, are born with those expectations. Fairy tales are indeed often—though not always—carriers of a kind of underground knowledge, as per your discussion about Cinderella (also see the 824th session for Mass Events), and the greatest fairy tales are always those in which the greatest expectations win out: The elements of the physical world that are unfortunate can be changed in the twinkling of an eye through great expectations.

The true power is in the imagination which dares to speculate upon that which is not yet (intently). The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probabilities. All of the possible versions of 1980 will happen. Except for those you settle upon, all of the others will remain psychologically peripheral, in the background of your conscious experience—but all of those possible versions will be connected in one way or another.

Now: In our book, I will be doing my best to explain the origin of your universe, and in such a way that most of the pertinent questions are answered, but man’s present concept of reality is so limited that I must often resort to analogies.

In the most basic of terms, as 1980 happens the energy that comes into your universe is as new as if (in your terms) the world were created yesterday—a point that will be rather difficult to explain. All of the probable versions of 1980 spin off their own probable pasts as well as their own probable futures, and any consciousness that exists in 1980 was (again in those terms) a part of what you think of as the beginning of the world.

Like the entire American hostage affair (in Iran), any physical event serves as a focus that attracts all of its probable versions and outcomes. The hostage situation (now in day 53) is a materialized mass dream, meant to be important and vital on political and religious platforms of reality, meant to dramatize a conflict of beliefs, and to project that conflict outward into the realm of public knowledge. Everyone involved was consciously and unconsciously a willing participant at the most basic levels of human behavior, and it is of course no coincidence that 1980 is immediately foreshadowed by that event. What will the world do with it?

2. Here Seth referred to the striking way in which my mother, Stella Butts, had recreated for the better her “memories” of her husband (my father). Robert Butts, Sr., died in February 1971, 34 months before she did. All of the members of the Butts family observed the pronounced changes in Stella’s thinking about her husband, although Jane and I were the only ones who ascribed those changes to her moving into another probable reality.