“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There is no such lapse in many other personality structures. Events, many events, are simultaneously perceived. Reactions are also nearly instantaneous in your terms. Growth and challenge is provided not in terms of achievement or development in time, but instead in terms of intensities. Such a personality is able, in your terms, not only to react and appreciate event A, say, in your present time, but also to experience and understand event A in all of its ramifications, and all of its probabilities.

You may consider past, present and future then as a single-line delineation of experience in your terms, the line however continuing indefinitely. Other personality structures from other dimensions could theoretically then observe it from an infinity of viewpoints. However there is far more than this. The single line is merely the surface thread along which you seem to travel. It is all of you that you perceive, so when you envision other dimensions you are forced to think in terms of observers far above the thread, looking down at it from any given viewpoint.

In actuality, following the image through, and strictly as an analogy, there would also be an infinite number of threads, both above and below your own, all part of one inconceivably miraculous webwork. Yet each thread itself would not be one-dimensional, but of many dimensions, and conceivably (underlined), if you knew how (Jane pointed at me for emphasis, still speaking rapidly), there would be ways of leaping from one thread to the other. You would not therefore be forced to follow any particular thread in a single-line fashion.

At some inconceivable point all of the threads would be in turn traversed. Self A, now on thread A, would not be aware in his present, of the quote “future” selves on the other threads. Only by meeting one of these other selves however can he become aware of the nature of this strange structure through which he is traveling.

Now all of this sounds complicated, but only because we must deal in words. Intuitively, I hope, you will be able to understand it. In the meantime the overall self is forming new threads of activity, you see. The frameworks that it leaves behind can be used by others. (Pause. As I’d asked earlier.)

Now. There is, and this will certainly seem a contradiction in terms, there is nonbeing. (Pause. Jane lit a cigarette.) It is a state, not of nothingness in your terms, but a state in which probabilities and possibilities are known, anticipated, but blocked from all expression.

This is the lesson that All That Is had to learn, and that could not be taught. This is the agony from which creativity originally was drawn, and its reflection is still seen.

All That Is, in your terms, retains memory of that state, and it serves as a constant impetus toward renewed creativity.

Each self, as a part of All That Is, therefore also retains memory of that state. It is for this reason that each portion of All That Is, each most minute consciousness, is endowed with the impetus toward survival, change, development and creativity. It is not enough that All That Is, as a primary consciousness-gestalt, desires further being, but, that every portion of it also carry this determination.

Yet the agony itself was used as a means, and the agony itself served as an impetus, strong enough finally so that All That Is initiated within itself the means to be.

All That Is therefore knows the agony of what you would call not being.

Not being, in other terms, is impossible. It is being without the means of expressing being. Now, every portion of consciousness is imbued with innate knowledge towards the means of expression and creativity. If, and this is impossible, all portions but the most minute last unit of All That Is were destroyed, All That Is could still continue, for within the smallest portion is the innate knowledge of the whole.

All That Is protects itself therefore, and all that it has, and is, and will create.

When I speak of All That Is, you must understand my position within it. All That Is knows no other. This does not mean that there may not be more to know. It does not mean, and here words quite fail us, it does not mean that All That Is, in any terms that we can conceive of, may not be limited. It knows of no other.

We do know that within this system, this overall system now, of our All That Is, that creation continues and developments are never still. Therefore we can deduce that on still other levels of which we are unaware, the same is true.

This first state of agonized search for expression may have represented the birth throes of All That Is as we know it. There existed, and clearly, the possibilities of creation as we know it, but the means were not known. Pretend then that you possessed within yourself the knowledge, the sight, of all the world’s masterpieces in sculpture and art, that they throbbed and pulsed as realities within you, but that you had no physical apparatus, no knowledge of how to achieve it; that there was neither rock, nor pigment, nor source of any of these, and you ached with the yearning to produce them—and this, on an infinitesimally small scale, will perhaps give you, as an artist, some idea of the agony and the impetus that was felt.

And each self is endowed with the agony and the impetus, for it is a fabric from which All That Is made itself, and all that you know. Perhaps now you can understand why it is so difficult to try to explain matters to you in terms that you can understand.

All That Is loves all that it has created, down to the least, for it realizes the dearness, and the uniqueness of each consciousness which had been wrest (spelled) from such a state and at such a price; and it is triumphant and joyful at each new development taken by each consciousness, for this is an added triumph against that first state, and an added security against that first state, and it revels and (takes) joy in the slightest creative act of each of its issue.

(Jane was speaking so rapidly here that I could not keep up, and I asked Seth to wait. I missed a word or two, but that’s all. It was obvious Jane’s trance was a very deep one.)

These connections between you therefore and All That Is can never be severed, and its awareness is indeed so delicate and focused that its attention is (underlined)directed with a prime creator’s love to each consciousness.

(Twenty minutes after the session ended Jane was standing up, washing her face, etc., but still feeling the aftereffects of the trance. She went to bed and slept deeply in spite of the heat; it remained hot all night.)