“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We think now that “Unknown” Reality could continue for the rest of our lives, really. In other, larger respects, it could go on for centuries. For all we know in ordinary conscious-mind terms at this “time,” there could be a third volume to the set (as Jane herself speculated in the 730th session, in Section 6), and a fourth and fifth….

The next four paragraphs contain some information on our publishing schedule that I’ll present as simply as I can. Originally I hadn’t planned on dealing with such material in these notes, but after talking it over, Jane and I agreed that it should be given here after all. There are various titles, section numbers, and dates to keep in mind, so these passages may take some rereading.

I averaged 40 of the sessions, just the parts devoted to dictation, for two things: the time Jane spent in trance only, and her trance time plus relevant break times. I obtained figures of 1:39 and 2:02 hours respectively. Then I multiplied each of these by 65. I found the low results difficult to believe; they speak volumes (the pun is deliberate) about the great speed that creativity — at least Jane’s — can show under certain conditions. For she completed the two volumes of “Unknown” Reality in a total trance time of 90:35 hours, or a total trance-plus-break time of 131:30 hours (sums which translate roughly into times of 45 hours and 65 hours per book). Keep in mind that these figures result from averages, and that the remaining 25 sessions would yield very similar results, since they include no extremes of brevity or length. So either hourly total is most remarkable for the involved creative accomplishment of “Unknown” Reality, regardless of the larger context in which those hours were really expended. For comparison, think of one week as consisting of 168 hours.

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.

“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.

“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.”