“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Without carrying the idea too far, I designed the notes and appendixes so that to some extent they reinforce each other, as the sessions themselves do. In Volume 1, I refer to certain sessions — the 681st, for instance — every so often because in them Seth comes through with key concepts that should be stressed.

I think Seth’s concept of simultaneous time will always elude us to some extent as long as we’re physical creatures, yet it gives clues to invisible mechanisms — we can better understand that Jane speaks her version of what Seth is. The very casting of the idea into words (as best Jane can do it) helps one grasp what Seth means: We can make intuitive nonverbal nudges, or jumps, toward understanding that to some degree transcend our trite ideas of that quality or essence we call time, and take so much for granted in our Western societies that to even question its seeming one-way flow appears to be quite futile.

However, the work we do deals with concepts that consciously we’d paid little attention to in earlier life. (I was 44 years old and Jane was 34 when she initiated the Seth material late in 1963). Jane’s early poetry, as I show in certain notes, clearly reflected her intuitive understanding of some of the concepts Seth came to elaborate upon much later. (This was true even when she was consciously unaware of what she was up to. See the verse from her early poem, Summer Is Winter, which precedes these notes.) As I see it, her task with the Seth material is to place these basic artistic ideas at our conscious service, so that their use in our daily lives can change our individual and collective realities for the better; and by “artistic ideas” here I mean the deepest, most aesthetic and practical — and, yes, mystical — truths and questions that human beings are capable of expressing, then contending with. Much of the response to her work that Jane receives by mail and telephone indicates this is happening. (That response, incidentally, will be discussed briefly at the end of these notes, when Seth’s letter to correspondents is presented.)

We prefer instead Seth’s — as well as our own — concepts of the inviolate nature of the individual consciousness, before, during, and after physical existence, in ordinary terms, and whether or not any theory of reincarnation is involved. It may be natural enough for us in the West not to enjoy the idea of surrendering our individual natures upon physical death, even if intellectually we can understand, for instance, the Buddhist teaching that “perfect” joy can be found in the eventual, blissful surrender of the self to a supreme spirit — although I note with some humor that personally I’ve yet to determine how the self who surrenders knows it’s done so if it’s been so thoroughly absorbed.

I’m more inclined to agree with what Seth told us in the 590th session in Chapter 22 of Seth Speaks: “You are not fated to dissolve into All That Is. The aspects of your personality as you presently understand them will be retained. All That Is is the creator of individuality, not the means of its destruction.” And whenever I read about conventional Eastern conceptions of a supreme spirit, I remember what Seth had to say in the 596th session in the Appendix of Seth Speaks: “I have used the term ‘expansion of consciousness’ here rather than the more frequently used ‘cosmic consciousness’ because the latter implies an experience of proportions not available to mankind at this time. Intense expansions of consciousness by contrast to your normal state may appear to be cosmic in nature, but they barely hint at those possibilities of consciousness that are available to you now, much less begin to approach a true cosmic awareness.”