“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

(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.

What part, for example, does chance play in your life? Is it chance if you arrive too late to board a plane, for example — to find later that the plane crashed? Perhaps your late arrival was caused by “a chance meeting” with a friend at the last moment, or by a misplaced ticket, or by a traffic jam that seemingly had nothing to do with you at all.

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.

I doubt if physicists in the 1920s were concerned about the psychological activity of atoms, molecules, or particles, although it seems that Heisenberg came close to Seth’s idea when he considered the free behavior of an electron emitted by a light ray. Albert Einstein, whose own work was rooted in strict causality, found a notion like the free will of an electron untenable, even though much earlier (in 1905) he had laid the foundation for quantum mechanics in his special theory of relativity.