“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:16.) Give us a moment…. The nature of time, questions concerning the beginning or ending of the universe—these cannot be approached with any certainty by studying life’s exterior conditions, for the physical references themselves are merely the manifestations of inner psychological activity. You are aware of the universe only insofar as it impinges upon your perception. What lies outside of that perception remains unknown to you. It seems to you, then, that the world began—or must have begun—at some point in the past¹ (a one-minute pause at 9:18), but that is like supposing that one piece of a cake is the whole cake, which was baked in one oven and consumed perhaps in an afternoon.

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.

(Very slowly.) Your numbering of the species is highly capricious. Again, you recognize as alive only those varieties of life that fall within certain ranges of attention. You objectify and diversify. The lines drawn between the self and what is nonself, between an organism and its environment, are highly arbitrary on your part. There are psychological patterns, therefore, that completely escape your notice because they do not follow the conventions that you have established. These combine what you diversify, so that you have hidden psychological values or psychological beings that combine the properties of the environment and the properties of selfhood in other combinations than those you know.

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.

(10:05.) At one time, however, you encountered such other formations in a different light, of course, seeing many similarities between their behavior and yours—certain characteristic ways of perceiving at least some experience that elicited your response and recognition.

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.

“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.

“The cautions are natural enough under the restrictions man usually places upon consciousness. Ruburt carries his protection and safety wherever he goes. It is a natural grace, characteristic of consciousness of any kind. Its protection and validity are always honored. Ruburt is safe wherever he goes. His psychological stance is honored wherever he goes.

Her consistency of attitude was strongly reinforced for me when, as I put together the notes for this session, I came across two rough, untitled poems that she’d produced on March 19, 1977—four years and eight months ago. I think it hardly coincidental that I found them just at this time. Jane had written them in colored ink in one of her 4 by 6 sketch pads. She hadn’t typed the poems for her journal, or shown them to me, but had quite forgotten about them. They’re presented a little later in this note.

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:

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.

Now, however, I took another small step and understood that if the three poems reflect deep fears Jane has, revolving around her abilities, they’re also united by her determination to press on with those gifts. Her “undeviating direction,” expressed in Poem One below, is directly related to the material about her that I quoted from Seth in Note 6 for Session 931, in Chapter 9 of Dreams: “Nothing, however, would have kept him at the sessions for this amount of time unless he wanted them.” (The session I cited had been held in February 1980, when Jane had been speaking for Seth for more than 17 years.)

So now it’s time to say— / “It’s all right,” /
and pick up the / magic bone / to try / its strange new /
nourishment. / I’ve prowled around it / for too long /
in circles; sniffing; / and I never did / say thanks.