“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We sat for the session at about 8:30. Once again Jane used many very long pauses as she spoke for Seth. I think that through Seth tonight she beautifully discusses several of her key insights into the nature of reality—and I don’t think it has ever been done any better.)

(Long pause.) The entire picture of physical life as you understand it must be of course experienced from your own viewpoint, but its complexity, its order and magnificence of structure and design should be understood as composing but one example of the infinite number of realities, each constructed by the propensities and characteristics of its own nature and the nature of its own consciousness.

The word “unconscious” is in a fashion meaningless. There are endless versions [of consciousness], of course, with their own worlds, forming organizations of meaning and purpose. Some of these mingle with your own and vice versa. The “inner structure” is one of consciousness, and the deeper questions can eventually only be approached by granting the existence of inner references.

The inner references of reality involve a different kind of experience entirely, with organizational patterns that mix and merge at every conceivable point. You tune your consciousness while you sleep as one might tune a piano, so that in waking reality, it clearly perceives the proper notes and values that build up into physical experience. Those inner fields of reference in which you have your existence are completely changing themselves as your experience is added to them, and your own (long pause) identity was couched in those references before birth as you understand it.

You are one conscious version of yourself, creating along with all of your contemporaries the realities of the times. When I use the term “contemporaries,” I refer to all of the species. You read your consciousness in certain fashions, but it is quite possible to read the consciousness of the world in other ways also.

(Pause at 9:35. Scientists do not know how many species exist on earth—only that they total in the billions.) If you read it sideways, so to speak, you would still end up with an orderly universe, but one in which the nature of identity would be read completely differently, stressing adjacent subjective communications of a conscious kind that form other kinds or patterns of subjectivity and psychological continuity. These result in the formation of “personalities” or entities who are aware of their own identities by following different pathways than your own, while also in their way contributing to the formation of your universe even as you do.

They would seem to be the spirits of nature,² as you would be more or less bound to interpret them from your viewpoint. They would certainly be psychological relatives, but with their own time schemes, languages, and psychological affiliations. These do exist along with the kinds of consciousness that you recognize within the structure of physical life. When you dream, however, you often come in contact with these cousins of consciousness. It is not simply that they communicate with you, or you with them, so much as it is that in sleep the conventional properties that you have learned are somewhat loosened and abandoned. You see “the lights around the corner,” so to speak. You see a species of consciousness, a species that must remain unexplained in any normal explanations of evolution, and these hint at the communications that exist at all levels (intently), protecting not only the genetic references necessary to your own kind, but the combinations of other forms of organization that exist adjacent to your own, yet connected to them. You have often misread such references, and many of your legends of good and evil spirits, monsters and strange varieties of artificial creatures, appear in folklore.

At one time, then, you were more open in a fashion to the kinds of consciousness that you admitted into your circle of reality. At one time, in those terms, you did not draw the lines as finely as you do now. Instead you included such cousins of consciousness into your midst, accepting a kind of comradeship—for to some extent at least you could see the different versions of humanity that resulted from a change of focus, an adjacent affiliation of humanized energy with the environment. Quite simply, you felt that in certain terms you had other brothers and sisters in the world that were like you but unlike you, that put together the contents of the universe in their own fashions. Such species, of course, can nowhere appear within the dictates of evolution or be perceived as realities except under those conditions when you relax your usual conventions of perception and behavior.

(10:18.) Nevertheless, encounters between you occur frequently—in the dream state as stated, in alterations of your usual focus, and in your arts, where you are less arbitrary in your definitions. As you began to bring your own physical reality into harder, clearer focus, you stopped with your own view of human consciousness, shutting off completely and rather arbitrarily those other elements in order to more clearly frame and define the boundaries of physical order. It seems to you now that such personalities (long pause) are not physically perceivable, but at one time you could bring them into the range of your perception.

(Seth at 10:28:) “You have been of excellent help to Ruburt lately. So far in our discussion of his own situation, we have not for good reason touched upon certain material because he was not ready for it.

“As his abilities grew, however, of course he sensed the outlines of other realities, the glimmerings of other worlds. He sensed these cousins of consciousness in one way or another—these environments that seemed real but not real, these further extensions of possible experience—and he decided that he must be very cautious: He must be prudent (long pause), he must take his time, he must range but carefully—and certainly to some extent such feelings cut down upon his spontaneity.

To me, Jane’s sensing of those “cousins of consciousness,” those “friendly colleagues,” and her very cautious reactions to her inner knowing, are clear signs of the consistency of her beliefs and her work through the years. And as I’ve shown in the notes for Dreams, it’s also obvious that in spite of Seth’s reassurances, and my own, she hasn’t felt safe wherever she goes.

The freshness of those poems was so vivid to me, their contents so pertinent to Jane’s situation today, that they seemed devoid of all that time that had passed since she’d written them. At once I thought of trying to explore that timelessness in the only way I could as a physical creature—by, contrariwise, taking the time to list a flow of events since she had conceived the poems, putting their creativity into perspective while still feeling it as if it were new. Arbitrarily, I chose professional events from our own lives, and thought of all of them as happening at once (as, according to Seth, in a larger framework they do). Obviously, anyone can compile such a list, involving any group of subjects. This happens to be the one I made:

Jane, then, wrote those two poems 16 days before she dictated the last session for Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche on April 4, 1977; one month before she began dictating Mass Events on April 18, 1977; two years and two months before she began God of Jane on May 6, 1979; two years and six months before she began dictating the Preface for Dreams on September 25, 1979; two years and eight months before she came up with the idea for If We Live Again on November 15, 1979; three years and five months before she began dictating Seth’s material on the magical approach to reality in Dreams on August 6, 1980; four years before she began dictating Seth’s sinful-self material in that book on March 11, 1981; four years and three months before she began coming through with her own sinful-self information on June 17, 1981; and four years and five months before, on August 26, 1981, she wrote the poem in Note 6 for Session 936 of Dreams: “Something in me / ebbs and tides, / as if I let myself / for a while / be washed away / out to sea / while leaving / some spidery shell / upon the shore /….”

I see that expanse of time (that four years and five months), as being really an emotional bridge between Jane’s poem in Note 6 for the 936th session and the two she wrote in March 1977. All three are entirely consistent not only with her beliefs and emotions, but with my own. For I feel now, in connection with the two “new” poems, the same profound sensations I had concerning Jane’s challenges when I wrote in Note 6: “Perhaps it was her poetic art of expression that helped me identify so strongly with her emotions, but I suddenly felt that even I had never really understood the myriad depths of her challenges and her reactions to them.” All three poems, then, are of a piece, in which she explores across time and emotion different facets of a common set of beliefs about friendly psychic colleagues and feelings of safety.