“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane slept well last night, got up with me this morning, and has had a relatively peaceful day. She said that “stuff’s been going on in the right side of my body all day. I don’t know what it is, so I’ve tried to ignore it.”

(She sat in her usual place on the couch, and I faced her in her chair across the coffee table. Behind me in the fireplace we heard once again the mysterious scratching or chucking or chirruping sounds we’ve become aware of lately, as though a family of animals or birds has young hatching our or growing in a nest on the other side of the closed damper. I’d heard the same sound a few days ago, but since it had been a windy day I’d thought the noise was caused by branches rubbing against the house or fireplace outside. We don’t know exactly what should be done about the situation, if anything. My present concern is that if there are young birds in the fireplace they may be trapped, not having room enough to learn to fly. But why would birds build a nest in such a place, assuming they could get to it to begin with? It didn’t seem natural for any creature to do that. We’ve also been under the impression since we moved in here that the fireplace had a screen sealing off the chimney from such possibilities.)

Now: all in all, the overall systems of conventional belief are relatively simple, and serve to define reality by numbering as truths or facts certain kinds of events, therefore accepting them as legitimate furniture for the mind.

Straight-laced people have often frowned upon the use of the imagination, considering it most disruptive. (Pause.) From the beginning Ruburt has questioned whether or not our material gave a true explanation of reality—or at least presented one that was as approximately true as possible. Or were only creative hypotheses being offered? Was the material true or false?

In that same framework then the nature of my own reality also of course comes into question. Am I an independent personality, who has indeed survived not one but many deaths? (Pause.) Inside of that framework you have very few alternatives to deal with. In the first place, as you are learning, your world accepts as valid that portion of an event that can show itself within your recognized time and space coordinates.

This applies not only to seemingly “pure” objective events, but to the more complicated event of an individual psychological being. Indeed, the entirety of your own identities does not usually appear to you in your lifetimes, because that reality is too complicated, too multidimensional, to fit into your accepted picture of personhood. In that regard the larger facts would not show themselves. There would be no way for you to perceive them from within (underlined) your system of reality.

(9:01.) When you are dealing with that kind of philosophical investigation, you are more or less forced to look for other definitions. (The noise from the fireplace was now quite loud.) Your very ideas of the nature of reality change. You are still to some extent forced to recognize conventional structures and organizations, including psychological ones. At the same time you search for greater evidence of a vastly different kind of reality. (Long pause.) The larger facts about psychological reality, for example, cannot be fitted to the world’s definitions. You can only get versions and interpretations. Translations and dramatizations that serve to give you glimpses of psychological structures whose very natures do not fit the facts of the world (all intently.

(9:14.) The yes-or-no, true-or-false categories simply do not work when you are dealing with such issues. (Long pause.) In that regard it is important that he realize this. The entire concept of the Sinful Self can only exist at certain levels of experience. It can only seem to make sense in a very limited context. (Pause.) The creative abilities most often serve as psychological bridges, enabling man to conceive of the existence of realities outside of his own particular point of reference. They can hint at the greater diversity of being, the larger dimension of events. They can present dramatizations. They can serve as thresholds (long pause), but they cannot contain direct experience themselves with events that are intrinsically beyond those reaches.

(Long pause.) Basic reality deals with far more than any true or false category, and the deeper dimensions of actuality contain the source material from which, indeed, your true or false world emerges—so it does Ruburt no particular good to overconcern himself. Our material is the best approximation, the best approximate model you can perceive of a vaster psychological field of existence.

(10:03. “The same to you, Seth. What’s this he’s playing with about the Speaker’s manuscripts?”)