“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I’m sure that that “energy personality essence,” as Seth calls himself, regarded with some amusement our gropings about how best to publish his work as the sessions began to pile up. I think that basically he was unconcerned with ideas of length or time; that Jane’s and my own willingness to continue delivering and recording the body of the material were the true arbiters of its length. In that sense, then, the creative processes involved with these two volumes were endless — at least until Jane and I called a halt to them for sheer physical reasons. (Those processes are still without end, of course, as is all creativity.)

I feel extremely cheered by the idea that Jane, simply by using her chosen physical apparatus and nonphysical mind, is consistently demonstrating abilities human beings are not supposed to possess. We aren’t satisfied with the answers to our questions that our social orders, whether Eastern or Western, give us. So, we say, each reader can make his or her own sense out of what the Seth material has to offer on such questions as the meaning of life, its depths and mysteries, its infinite possibilities.

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.

“When I’m Seth, I’m just a small part of his reality, maybe only the portion I can grasp, but I bask in that personified energy. When Seth turns his attention to people, addressing them or answering questions, then I sense an almost multidimensional appreciation of their worth and individuality. He understands the validity of each person, or salutes it, approaching people in an entirely different light than we do. That experience of his reaction to others leads me to suspect the existence of an emotional experience far more vivid than the one we know.

“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.

“We love to look ‘backward’ at our animal origins. We take it for granted that evolution in those terms is over, and here we are — aha, kings of the mountain. But maybe we’re just in the middle, sensing imperfectly the existence of other remote versions of ourselves that will appear in a ‘future’ too far ahead of us to know. Maybe I’m some distant ancestor of Seth’s in those terms, alive in my life but only a memory in his. But he insists there’s fresh action in the past; so if that’s the case, I’m still searching out my own paths.

“When I get this far in my own thinking, a peculiar acceleration seizes me. My body grows very relaxed, but my mind has a strange feeling of motion as if something I’m trying to comprehend is going past me too fast to follow; yet I keep trying to twirl faster myself to catch up. If one of my cells tried to comprehend my own subjective reality, it might feel the same way. I think that I’m alive in Seth’s subjective ‘body’ in the same way that one of my cells is alive in my physical body. Only I keep groping … and sensing events that my own reality can’t really understand.

“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.