“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Here’s Seth from the 750th session, held on June 25, 1975, two months after he finished Volume 2. In it he not only sums up his motives in producing “Unknown” Reality, but comments on another one of his basic ideas that I think it important to stress every so often; this time, perception is involved. “The ‘Unknown’ Reality was written to give … individuals glimpses into alternate patterns of reality. It was meant to serve as a map that would lead, not into another objectified universe per se, but into inner roads of consciousness. These inner roads or strands of consciousness bring elements into play so that it becomes possible to realize that the content of a given objectified universe may actually be perceived quite differently. You are part of what you perceive. When you alter the focus of your perception you automatically change the objectified world. It is not simply that you perceive it differently while it remains the same, regardless of your experience. The act of perception itself helps form the perceived event and is a part of it.”

And what of Jane’s feelings about her relationship with Seth? The mechanics of her mediumship? Our idea at first was that she’d write her own introduction to accompany these notes, but finally she decided that wasn’t necessary; nor did she want to repeat much of the material she’s already covered in her own books. Instead, in March, 1976, she produced the following essay, which I consider to be an excellent summation of the combined inner and outer realities she experiences while speaking for Seth:

“The ‘Unknown’ Reality itself is a product of the unknown reality of the mind, of course, since I produced it entirely in a trance state, as Seth. In a way the two volumes are the products of an inner psychic ‘combustion’ — the spark that is lit in our world, as Seth’s reality strikes mine — or vice versa. For me, this is an accelerated state. I would compare it to a higher state of wakefulness rather than to the sleep usually associated with trance — but a different kind of wakefulness, in which the usual world seems to be the one that is sleeping. My attention is not blunted. It is elsewhere.

“In many ways, we’re a lonely species. We seem to be forever prowling around the confines of our own nature. Maybe our idea of identity is like a magic circle we’ve drawn around our minds, so that everything outside seems dark and alien, unselflike. There may be other psychic fires lighting up that inner landscape with a far greater light than ours; other aspects of consciousness to which we’re connected as surely as we’re connected also to the animals in a chain of being we barely comprehend.

“This may just be the conscious mind’s reaction as it tries to glimpse its own source. Perhaps when we try such feats we pause, figuratively speaking, on our conscious platforms, looking upward and downward at the same time. Like weightless spacemen we know who we are, but we aren’t sure of our position, which shifts psychologically in inner space. We grow momentarily dizzy, dazzled by an inner cosmos of selves and self-versions, and feel that we are traveling through some gigantic psyche that spawns selves the way space spawns stars.”

All mail does not come from the postman, so each of you should have your own kind of inner response from me whatever letter you have sent by mail. I serve in many ways as a speaker for your own psyche, however, so the inner message will be from your own greater being to yourself; and at that multidimensional level of reality, I salute you.