“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(A week has passed, and I’m still surprised: Not only has Jane helped me considerably in planning the notes for Psyche, but the other day she switched over to my Introductory Notes for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality and began organizing them in the same loose way.

(Not long ago I reached an impasse with both the Introductory Notes and the Epilogue for Volume 2, as I tried to give order to the mass of notes, excerpts, and jotted-down ideas that I’ve assembled for them since finishing work on Volume 1 in September 1976. That was some 18 months ago, but actually to one degree or another I’ve been involved with “Unknown” Reality for four years now; I think that temporarily I’ve simply grown tired and overly concerned about the whole project, even while I still have a considerable way to go to finish certain notes and appendixes for Volume 2. Not that I haven’t worked on a number of other things at the same time, of course — but my labors on those two books represent the prolonged, intense focus I always search for in my creative life, and without which I feel incomplete. Jane knows all too well what I mean, for her own attitudes here follow mine very closely.

(So in one day Jane was able to mentally sort out my material and start to delineate the flow necessary to make the Introductory Notes successful, and she intends to do the same thing with the Epilogue. It’ll still be up to me to add my kind of detail to each of those works, but there’s no doubt that she’s enjoying the challenge of playing with the Seth books from the “other side” — my viewpoint — for a change. I told her that I’d never envisioned her showing that kind of interest in my approach to the sessions and books.)

The consciousness of that myth can indeed have no origin, for the myth precludes anything but a physically-oriented and physically-mechanized consciousness. Not only could that consciousness have no existence before or after death, but obviously it could have no access to knowledge that was not physically acquired. It is this myth that hampers your understanding most of all, and that closes you off from the greater nature of those events with which you are most intimately concerned. That myth also makes your own involvement with mass events sometimes appear incomprehensible.

I am speaking largely to a Western audience, and so here I am using terms for a particular reason, to explain concepts in a way that will be understood. The inner ego (see the last session) is perfect as a term to suit my purposes. Let me stress again that the “unconscious” is indeed conscious — and by conscious I mean that its reasoning is not irrational. Its methods are not chaotic, and its characteristics are not only equal to those of the known ego, but indeed are more resilient and knowledgeable.

Frameworks 1 and 2 obviously represent not only different kinds of reality in normal terms, but two different kinds of consciousness. To make this discussion as simple as possible for now, at least, think of these two frameworks or states of consciousness as being connected by “undifferentiated areas” in which sleep, dreaming, and certain trance states have their activity. Those undifferentiated areas are involved in the constant translation of one kind of consciousness into the other, and with energy transferences. You constantly process those data that come to you in your private life, and that information includes bulletins from all over the world, through your news broadcasts and so forth.

The inner ego has access, again, to a much vaster amount of knowledge. It is aware not only of its own private position, as you are of yours, but it is also familiar with the mass events of its reality. It is intimately involved in the creation of your own private experience.

I said that the inner ego reasons, but its reasoning is not restricted to the cause-and-effect limitations that you apply to the reasoning process. The action of the inner ego within the wider sphere of Framework 2 explains many events and seeming coincidences that otherwise seem to make no sense within your world. Many realities within Framework 2 cannot suitably be explained as facts to you in Framework 1, simply because they involve psychological thicknesses that cannot be translated into facts as you think of them. These often appear in the symbolic language of the arts instead, and many of your dreams are translations in which the events of Framework 2 appear in symbolic form.

Give us a moment… The consciousness that you have, as generally described in psychology, is in a strange fashion like the bright shiny skin of a fruit — but with no fruit inside; a consciousness with a shiny surface that responds to sun or rain or temperature, and to its surroundings; but for all of that a psychological fruit that has no pulp or pits, but contains at its heart a vacancy. In those terms you experience only one half of your consciousness: the physically-attuned portion. Fruit trees have roots, but you assign no ground of being to this consciousness.

Jung’s collective unconscious was an attempt to give your world its psychological roots, but Jung¹ could not perceive the clarity, organization, and deeper context in which that collective unconscious has its own existence. Reality as Framework 2 is organized in a different fashion than it is in the Framework 1 world, and the processes of reasoning are far quicker. In Framework 1 the reasoning processes work largely by deduction, and they must constantly check their own results against the seemingly concrete experience of physical events. The reasoning of the inner ego is involved with the creative invention of those experiences. It is involved with events in a context of a different kind, for it deals intimately with probabilities.

(Long pause.) [Each of] you, with your beliefs and intents, tell the inner ego which of an infinite number of probable events you want to encounter. In the dream state events from both frameworks are processed. The dream state involves not only a state of consciousness that exists between the two frameworks of reality, but also involves, in those terms, a connecting reality of its own. Here I would like to emphasize that to one degree or another all species of plant and animal life “dream.” The same applies to the “psychological activity” of atoms and molecules, and any “particle.”² Period.

(10:45. Before the session, Jane told me now, she’d known “that Seth would talk about some of that stuff.” As it had been in the last session, her delivery tonight was quite slow; the difference this evening, though, was that she’d sensed many of those pauses. But this was the kind of session she liked, and when she came out of trance she felt that more time should have passed. Jane added that “you get a deeper subjective flow” of material when the delivery lasted without a break for an hour, or thereabouts, instead of for the old half-hour periods.

You may have become a part of the drama of a natural disaster, or avoided it as a result of other seemingly chance occurrences. What appears to you as chance or coincidence, however, is actually the result of the amazing organizations and communications active in the psychological reality of Framework 2. Again, you form your reality — but how? And how do private existences touch each other, resulting in world events? Before we go any further, then, we must look into the nature of Framework 2.

It is somewhat humorous that such a vital consciousness could even suppose itself to be the end product of inert elements that were themselves lifeless, but somehow managed to combine in such a way that your species attained fantasy, logic, vast organizational power, technologies, and civilizations. Your myths tell you that nature itself has no intent except survival. It cares little for the individual — only insofar as the individual helps the species to endure. In its workings, nature then appears to be impersonal, even though it so consists of individuals that it cannot be regarded otherwise.

2. For those who are interested: As soon as Seth mentioned the “psychological activity” of atoms and molecules, I was intuitively and strongly aware of connections between his statement and at least two principles of modern physics. Yet I hesitated. “I know my feelings are right,” I told Jane, “but how do I explain them in a few words and make any sense?” I was also constrained by the limits of my own knowledge. Especially, though, I sensed relationships between Seth’s idea on the one hand, and both the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics and the principle of complementarity on the other.