“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth began dictating The “Unknown” Reality: A Seth Book, in the 679th session for February 4, 1974, and finished it with the 744th session for April 23, 1975. In the beginning we anticipated another intriguing Seth book, the successor to Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality. We thought the new work would probably be a long one, but we hardly expected that it would require publication in two volumes.

The firm decision to do this was made when we were visited by Jane’s editor at Prentice-Hall, Tam Mossman, and a business colleague who accompanied him. By then it was obvious that in a couple of weeks Seth would be through with “Unknown” Reality, as we’d taken to calling it. For some time all of us present had been aware that as a single volume this new work would be more massive than we wanted it to be. Jane and I were really pleased, then, to get the official word. Not only would the expanded format be something out of the ordinary in itself, but it meant that with two volumes I’d have the room I needed for notes and references; excerpts from Jane’s ESP class sessions, as well as from “regular” sessions dated before and after the production time of “Unknown” Reality; a little of Jane’s poetry; and appendixes — all of which I thought would add extra dimensions of consciousness to the books. (And, of course, I couldn’t begin these notes until such a decision had been made.)

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.)

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.

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.