“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.

Now that is the challenge and the ideal, and it is met to varying degrees by personalities at various stages of development. Obviously such personalities need far more than the neurological systems with which you are presently equipped. For such systems such experience is literally impossible. Now your neurological system is physical but it is based upon your own inner capabilities as of, quote, “now.”

It is a materialization of an inner framework, an inner psychic framework. Many other personality structures do not need a materialized perceptive framework, such as this, but an inner psychic organization is always present. It also represents the personality’s present capabilities.

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.

There is however a self who has already traveled these routes, of whom these other selves are but part. This self, in dreams and dissociated conditions, communicates with these various quote “ascending” selves. But as the self grows in value fulfillment, he can become aware of these other travelers on other threads, who might seem to him to be future selves.

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.

Dimly, through what you would call a history, hardly remembered, there was such a state. It was a state of agony in which the powers of creativity and existence were known, but the ways to produce them were not known.

(9:43. Jane left trance, which had been deep, easily. The call was from Bill Macdonnel in Santa Barbara, California. After she hung up Jane told me that before the session she’d had the feeling we would be interrupted in some way— probably through a visitor; but she hadn’t told me beforehand.

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.

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.

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.

(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.)

(It was fifteen minutes before she could open her eyes. It was difficult for her to snap loose, though at no time did she exhibit any worry or concern. It seemed to be a long way back for Jane. I suspected her sensitivity to heat and humidity might have contributed to the trance depth; before the session she hadn’t felt very active, but still wanted to hold the session.

(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.)