“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth himself said nothing about publishing “Unknown” Reality in one volume, two volumes, or even more, while he was producing it. He referred to it as one unit until the very last session, the 744th, when he said in answer to a question I asked “The Seth material is endless. I organize it for your benefit. If you want to divide it into two volumes, that is fine. You will find several points where this can be done …” In our final view, however, the obvious point of division is also the best one: three sections in each volume. I’ll note a little more about this natural point of separation in the Epilogue of this book.

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.)

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….

During our book sessions, which are almost always private — held without witnesses, that is — Seth speaks at a moderate enough pace so that I can take down his dictation verbatim in my own kind of shorthand. Although it’s often hard work, I find this approach more intimate and meaningful than passively using a tape recorder; I also have time to insert my own comments as we go along. Then, later, I type the sessions. I can do this much more quickly and comfortably from my notebook than I can from a tape. As I wrote in Personal Reality, I believe that Jane’s ability to deliver Seth’s material with so few changes being made in it “says important things about these sessions.” (See my notes at the end of the 610th session, in Chapter 1 of that book.) And concerning my objective observations of Seth himself, I’ll let my notes in the sessions build up whatever composite picture I’m able to construct.

Like the other Seth books, then, each volume of “Unknown” Reality contains not only the Seth sessions, but Jane’s and my own ideas about them, as well as our notes on the circumstances surrounding their production.

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.

As I note in the Epilogue for this volume, Section 6 in Volume 2 contains the story of how we moved into our “hill house,” just outside Elmira, N.Y., a month before Seth completed that section — and his part in “Unknown” Reality as a whole — in April, 1975. But in October, 1974, long before our move from the two apartments we occupied in downtown Elmira, Jane started her Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book; that book is the sequel to Adventures in Consciousness, and is to be published this Fall (in 1976) by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Politics is also mentioned in the Epilogue to Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, and my first session notes on it show up in Section 4, in the second volume.

We’d intended to publish Volume 1 before Politics, but since Jane finished her book before I could complete the notes for the two Seth books (I found it necessary to do many of the notes for both volumes together), we decided to publish Politics first instead. Our move to the hill house also cost me considerable working time on the manuscripts. So it’s obvious, then, that Politics jumps ahead of “Unknown” Reality as far as a strictly correct publishing chronology is concerned.

In Politics Jane also refers to certain blocks of material that first appeared in “Unknown” Reality, so I’ve adjusted the appropriate notes in the latter to account for their earlier discussion. Intrinsically there’s no conflict between Jane’s latest and Seth’s latest, however. Each one enhances the other. I simply want to stress that our overall goal is the publication of Jane’s books (including those produced with Seth), and that each work is a complete entity while containing within itself the necessary references to others in the series.

Every so often I’ve thought of averaging Jane’s dictation time for Seth Speaks and Personal Reality in the same way, but haven’t done so. I’m somewhat puzzled to note, however, that her very short working times for the Seth books seem to be either ignored or taken for granted by practically everyone — or, perhaps, those factors just aren’t understood in terms of ordinary linear time. Maybe I’m alone in my interest here, for even Jane doesn’t express any great curiosity about the time she has invested in the Seth material; she just delivers it. But given her abilities, I think her speed of production is a close physical approach to, or translation of, Seth’s idea that basically all exists at once — that really there is no time, and that the Seth books, for example, are “there” to be had in final form for just the tuning in. (In Section 3 of this volume, Note 2 for Session 692 contains information on another way by which we can move closer to Seth’s idea of simultaneity from our physical reality, but that method grows out of material not discussed here.)

Do I think that Jane, in trance, could actually deliver a complete, book-length manuscript in just 45 hours? The question must be hypothetical, but I’m sure she could as far as having Seth’s material available is concerned; she’d need only the necessary physical strength. Even now, while speaking for Seth she can easily outtalk my writing capacity by many hours. The information from Seth would be there. The work produced would be different from the “same” work delivered over a longer time. Seth wouldn’t have our current daily activities to draw upon for some of his analogies, for instance, but in such cases I think he’d either call upon similar episodes from our pasts, or cast his material in different ways — which would yield the same results.

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.

And Jane’s intent and mine, too. Jane’s books are records of her use of certain abilities that we think are very creative; the questions she raises present us with larger fields to investigate. Ordinarily we don’t think of those questions — and challenges — as being mystical in origin, not from our Western social viewpoint. Seth discusses Jane’s early religious background, her “deeply mystical nature,” in the first session of this volume (the 679th), and I add some material on mysticism in an appendix to that session. That information is related to these introductory notes, yet it should be separate.

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.)

In the Seth books we’ve deliberately refrained from commenting upon the similarities that exist between Seth’s ideas and those of various religious, philosophical, and mystical doctrines from the Near, Middle, or Far East. This approach fits our natures, of course. Jane and I know that such correlations exist — indeed, we’d only be surprised if they didn’t. Others have often mentioned them to us, and we’ve done a little reading on Buddhism, Hinduism, Zen, and Taoism, for example, not to mention subjects like shamanism, voodooism, and obeah. It’s obvious, we think, that a book could be written comparing the Seth material with other systems of thought, whether religious or not, but Jane and I, being individualists, have chosen not to concentrate upon those areas. Nor is what I’m writing here meant to be taken as an attempt to put down other approaches to “basic” reality.

Although there are similarities, then, in our view there are vital differences, too, between Seth’s philosophy and that of many other organized systems. Jane and I prefer to think about the unities we find in our world as including religions, not being defined by them, and we think Seth stresses this. We go along in our own stubborn ways, knowing that our outlooks are rooted in the Western traditions of the world, but also knowing that there exist all about us these numerous other philosophies or systems, some of them many centuries old, that the human race has created to help it explain reality. Yet we feel no compulsion to intimately know the details of, say, Sufism or Brahmanism. (A simile I often think of here compares Eastern and Western life and thought with the right and left hemispheres of the brain; they’re separate, yet united; each half performs functions that complement and to some extent overlap those of the other, and together they operate as a whole.) But we dislike the idea of nirvana in Buddhism and Hinduism, which calls for the extinction or blowing out of individual consciousness, and its absorption into a supreme spirit, usually after a series of lives. And we object to the notion that “nature,” in those terms of linear time, has so arranged things that the individual has to pay a karmic debt in one life as the result of actions in a previous one. Why should nature punish anyone if it doesn’t punish anything? The realities of nirvana and karma are not ones that Jane and I want to create.

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.

It’s plain that many arguments can be brought against all I’ve written in the last four paragraphs, I suppose, yet the material in them briefly approximates the ways Jane and I look at the Seth material these days in relation to other philosophies. Especially do I like the fact that Jane’s work, her contribution to our thought, comes out of her psyche unaided by laboratories, statistics, or tests. That is, our idea of real testing consists in watching to see how the Seth material can assist in practical, everyday living. Other kinds of tests, more “formal” ones that we carried out in 1965–66, are detailed in Chapter 8 of The Seth Material; it’s easy for us to forget now that those early tests were quite successful, and could be resumed at any time. When they were held I wondered (as I still do) why the human animal, of all the creatures on earth, felt it necessary to construct laboratories in which to “prove” what it really is, what its abilities — telepathic, metabolic, or whatever — really are. This subject alone is so vast that Jane and I could write about it indefinitely, so I can barely mention it here.

In his laboratories, man thus has great opportunities to obtain preprogrammed answers, based on what he thinks he already knows; his exteriorized equipment can hardly produce anything else. (A scientist doesn’t call an atom of oxygen, or one of any other element, alive, let alone conscious. Yet a collection of certain atoms assembled into a human form calls itself alive — and vehemently denies the same status to identical atoms that have the misfortune to exist outside of that human framework.) But some of the reasons for our exceedingly poor understanding of the general human state are discussed by Seth in the material he’s given over the last decade, and I’m sure there is much more to come.

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.

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.

“As Jane, I’m not discarded when I’m in such a trance. Yet I step out of my Jane-self in some indescribable way, and step right back into it when the session is over. So there must be another ‘I’ who leaves Jane patiently waiting at the shore while ‘I’ dive headlong into those other dimensions of experience and identity. Once the almost instant transformation is over, ‘I’ become Seth or Seth becomes what I am. And in that state, the conditions of perception are those native to other lands of consciousness than ours.

“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.

“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.”

And, finally, what of our efforts to handle the steadily increasing volume of mail that’s resulted from the publication of Jane’s books? (Incidentally, we have on file most of the letters and cards we’ve received over the years.) Our latest attempt to cope here consists of three pieces we’ve prepared for correspondents: a short form letter from Jane and me; a longer one dictated by Seth in April, 1975, soon after he finished Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality; and a list of all editions of Jane’s books. (We prepared such a list in answer to many requests, and it’s being continually updated, of course.) Yet the form letters aren’t really a satisfactory answer for the correspondent who’d like a personal response from Jane and/or Seth; given our characteristics, they merely represent the best we can do within the time we have available. Jane handles most of the mail herself these days, and tries to add a few individual lines to each reply. With this system she acknowledges more letters than ever before, yet it’s ironic that there are still more to answer simply because of the greater number received.

Once before (in January, 1973), Seth dictated a letter for us to send to those who wrote, and it can be found in the 633rd session in Chapter 8 of Personal Reality. Many people liked that letter (they still do) — and some wrote back in response to it! Because of this, Jane and I suggest that Seth’s earlier letter be read in conjunction with the one below, for as Jane says, the two complement and reinforce each other. We feel that both messages from Seth reflect much of the essence of his material, and our own circumstances and attitudes surrounding its production. Certainly we think that presenting Seth’s new letter here makes an ideal way to conclude these notes. (Seth refers to Jane by her male entity name, Ruburt; and to me as Joseph, for the same reason.)