“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Here’s Seth from the 750th session, held on June 25, 1975, two months after he finished Volume 2. In it he not only sums up his motives in producing “Unknown” Reality, but comments on another one of his basic ideas that I think it important to stress every so often; this time, perception is involved. “The ‘Unknown’ Reality was written to give … individuals glimpses into alternate patterns of reality. It was meant to serve as a map that would lead, not into another objectified universe per se, but into inner roads of consciousness. These inner roads or strands of consciousness bring elements into play so that it becomes possible to realize that the content of a given objectified universe may actually be perceived quite differently. You are part of what you perceive. When you alter the focus of your perception you automatically change the objectified world. It is not simply that you perceive it differently while it remains the same, regardless of your experience. The act of perception itself helps form the perceived event and is a part of it.”

“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.

“Yet I’m sure that Seth stands for something else, a different kind of personhood, and that Seth ‘happens’ when that kind of being intersects with my subjective world.