“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

After finishing my reading, I may have watched television for a few moments. Then I went out to the kitchen to wash a pan that I’d left soaking in the sink. As I did this, suddenly a concise clear stream of words came through my head: “Great as these things are, there is a totality of experience and sensation that includes them all, a vortex that contains and transforms these infinite parts.”

I was totally alert and critical at the time, focused at a high point of concentration, though, in that all of my attention was pivoted expectantly. The experience was fascinating and increasingly enjoyable. Earlier, I’d sipped beer as I watched television. Now the half-full glass was beside me. I drank some now and then, and also smoked. A strong sense of exhilaration was present, as was the feeling of great energy. There was no feeling that any particular personality was giving me the information, yet there was the certainity that the words were being delivered from somewhere or someone outside my own reality. They didn’t seem to well up from inside me, but to be dropped down into my head.

At the same time, the people in the apartment downstairs got company. They came tramping and laughing up the steps just beneath my open window. Suddenly, the sound of traffic also bothered me. I’d been unaware of it only a moment before. Now, the cars went rushing through the rain. All of these sounds merged together, intensified, while each retained its own unique quality.

Great as these things are, there is a totality of experience and sensation that includes them all, a vortex that contains and transforms these infinite parts. I know that of which I speak. Yet, each minute event immeasurably increases not only itself but all other events, bringing into birth by its own actualization an infinitude of novus actions and events, an unfolding or multi-dimensionalizing of itself, an initiation into dimensionalization. For all versions and possibilities of each event must be actualized in the limitless multiplication of creativity.

Each probable event is changed by each other probable event. There is constant simultaneous interaction. These ‘separate’ probable systems do not operate isolated from each other, then, but are intimately connected. All systems are open. The physical moment is transparent, though you give it a time-solidity. You see it as opaque.

Along with the last sentence, I saw an image that is difficult to explain. It was a rectangular object that reminded me of a gadget shown to us once by Jim Beal from NASA that reacted to light and another that reacted to pressure. Both of those gadgets turned all colors and achieved different stages of transparency and opaqueness. So did the object I saw now. It was supposed to represent the moment as we perceive it. The center section of the rectangle was most opaque and the ends most transparent. There were new bursts of noise from downstairs at this point, and the image vanished.

Greet the now-realization of all of your dreams, for they also participate in the probable system. As your dreams bleed into your normal conscious life, so do they bleed into other probabilities. A dream act is actualized by a waking you, as a waking you is actualized by a dreaming self.

I half waken and then drift into a recurring scene from an old childhood dream: There is a killer fog behind us, and we must get down a snowy path to home before the fog gets us. We are struggling past a large factory, when all at once I am sitting with Jane as Seth again, watching the snow dream as if it were a movie. I say, ‘Of course,’ and realize that I can relieve the people in the snow. Suddenly I feel the shell of my physical body for what it is — my own creation — and am aware of how much more I am. I go back into the snow scene. We all make the safety of the house, and I wish all the characters in the dream peace and safety from the killer fog. They will never have to fear it again. I wake up.

In the meantime, Sue began to have a series of dreams dealing with probabilities, the first of them in August, 1970. She wrote the dream down as usual, and called me on the phone to tell me about it. I was astonished. As she read the dream, all kinds of images and ideas came into my mind.

I walk down a street of a town not unlike Elmira and go into a small open-air restaurant which seems to have been made from one of those hexagonal pavillions. It is in a park-like place with grass and trees all around. The color and detail are vivid, even to salt and pepper shakers on the large common table in the middle.

There I see, to my surprise and joy, Jane and Rob Butts sitting talking to some other people. Or are they Jane and Rob? They are older-looking and both look very cynical about whatever they are discussing. I wonder if the town is Sayre, Pennsylvania and if we are all really there or if we have made this place up. The other people go away, and I go sit down next to Jane, and, to my surprise, they do not acknowledge or recognize me at all.

Jane and Rob glance at each other and laugh — a nasty, bitter laugh. ‘She still works all day at the taxi company’ Rob says, “and I work too. Want to come home and see the paintings I’ve done?’

I nod and we walk out of the restaurant — Seth trailing along behind. We walk down a shaded, quiet street and turn in at a large white house with a screened lower porch. There is a large tree to the left of the porch, and a weedy driveway leads back to a large white barnish-looking building with double top-hinged doors. We go up a set of outside stairs and into an apartment which seems to have a large living room. Rob is about to haul out some paintings — they seem to be landscapes — when he groans in agony and nearly falls down in pain from his back, apparently. He manages to lie down on the floor and I try to show him some yoga exercises for it, but he brushes me off. I suddenly feel desperate to do something for them before it all ends.

It happened some months before our first psychic experiences. Rob was ill, and we were vacationing in Maine. One night we went to a nightclub, hoping for a change of mood. Rob could hardly walk, his back hurt him so badly. The room was small and crowded, the tables were all full, and the band blared. Suddenly, I noticed an older couple sitting across from us. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. As if hypnotized, I sat staring.

Later the couple just disappeared as far as we were concerned. We thought they might have left while we weren’t watching them. But from that night on, Rob began to improve. We danced all night, and now dancing is one of our favorite activities. We knew that something had happened very important to our lives, but we had no idea what was really involved.

After the Seth sessions began, Seth told us that we, ourselves, had created the images of the couple, projected all of our negative attitudes into them and then reacted. I didn’t know what to think of this explanation at the time. Later as we explained the nature of personality and its creative potentials, I saw that this was precisely what we had done.

Seth told us that such images have a definite reality, but we certainly weren’t prepared to hear that someone else encountered our York Beach selves in a dream! “To create them with all our negative feelings was bad enough,” I said to Sue, “but then to cast them loose on their own!”

The experience was quite legitimate, and it was meant as a lesson on many levels. First of all, it is apparent that there is communication between various systems of probabilities and that actions in one system can and do affect the other.

By comparing the two couples, therefore, she receives an object lesson both for herself and her husband. More than this, however, through the experience all of you learned that help is extended from one system to the other. The other couple, the probable couple, have also helped you and your friend, though quite unknowingly at conscious levels, by serving as such object lessons.

At York Beach, originally. They contained, therefore, all of your fears, for you foresaw that in this system you could become such people — not that this was inevitable, but definitely probable and more than possible.

Having created them because of your abilities, you then perceived them as objectified apparitions in physical reality, when Ruburt immediately made the conscious comparison, and resolved that you should never end up looking like them … or filled with the bitterness that was written in their faces. The conscious notice, therefore, was all you knew of the deep unconscious creative endeavor and psychological mechanism that brought them into existence.

That Robert Butts did not continue his painting with any purpose, trying to be objective and sensible, lacking the understanding of his parents that you have achieved through sessions. He put security in financial terms above everything, took no chances at all along those lines, and despite this, of course, is not making much money because his heart was, with the painting, most largely abandoned.

There is no need to go further into their history, but I assure you that it was in keeping with the characteristics that you gave them; and remember, these were your own strongest fears. With all of this however latent, you see, they had your potential. I was able to make an inadequate but definite contact, and their existence can still be changed and altered, for they have free will, as you do.

Now, in the life of each personality there are, of course, moments of deep crisis and decision, where a personality decides upon one of various possible choices. These moments are not necessarily conscious at all, and the choices are not necessarily conscious, though often they rise to consciousness. But by then, the inner work and decision has been done.