“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The appendix idea worked well in both The Seth Material and Seth Speaks. Here in “Unknown” Reality the individual excerpt or session in an appendix, with whatever notes it may have, is usually pretty complete in itself. These pieces can be read at any time, but I prefer that the reader go over each one when it’s first mentioned in a footnote, just as he or she ought to check out all other reference material in order throughout both volumes.

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.

One can have a lot of fun with numbers. They can, for instance, be used to explore different perspectives of the same subject — in this case, time, the quality that’s just been under discussion. The two volumes of “Unknown” Reality contain 65 sessions. Jane delivered these for Seth over a period of a little more than 14½ months. This elapsed time includes more than a few weeks during which she gave no book dictation at all, of course, but I was curious to get an approximate idea of the number of hours she actually spent in producing the entire work.

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.

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.

“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.

“The trance state is characterized by a feeling of inexhaustible energy, emotional wholeness, and subjective freedom. At times Seth’s voice is very loud and powerful. Even in trance I’m aware of this, and I’m swept along in its energy. In the first years of my mediumship Seth’s voice and accent seemed very odd to me, whether I heard myself speaking for him during sessions or listened to tapes. But in the trance, what is known is known. Returning to my usual condition, the words that I’ve just spoken as Seth vanish in dreamlike fashion. Although I’ve read “Unknown” Reality since it was finished, and had looked portions of it over during the time of its production, it seems alien to me in the strangest fashion.

“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.

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.