“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Since the sections themselves are of unequal length, for a while I contemplated trying a four-and-two division; but as Jane commented, “Three sections in one book are enough of a bite for the reader.” We do think most people will find it more convenient to have “Unknown” Reality presented, with indexes, in two shorter works, whether or not they’re of equal length. Volume 2 will be published a year or so after the first printing of Volume 1. After that initial waiting period, the two can always be read together.

Since Jane began publishing the Seth material in 1970, she’s received many hundreds of calls and letters about her work. We’re very grateful for all of those communications (including the letters we haven’t answered yet), but I don’t recall this fantastic time element being mentioned in even one of them.

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.

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.

“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.