“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(11:22.) Such a development would, however, necessitate first of all a broadening of concepts about the self, and a greater understanding of human potential. Human consciousness is now at a stage where such a development is not only feasible, but necessary if the race is to achieve its greatest fulfillment.

While you have highly limited concepts about the nature of the self, you cannot begin to conceive of a multidimensional godhood, or a universal reality in which all consciousness is unique, inviolate — and yet given to the formation of infinite gestalts of organization and meaning.

In my other books I used many accepted ideas as a springboard to lead readers into other levels of understanding. Here, I wish to make it clear that this book⁴ will initiate a journey in which it may seem that the familiar is left far behind. Yet when I am finished, I hope you will discover that the known reality is even more precious, more “real,” because you will find it illuminated both within and without by the rich fabric of an “unknown” reality now seen emerging from the most intimate portions of daily life. Give us a moment. (Pause at 11:35.) Your concepts of personhood are now limiting you personally and en masse, and yet your religions, metaphysics, histories, and even your sciences are hinged upon your ideas of who and what you are. Your psychologies do not explain your own reality to you. They cannot contain your experience. Your religions do not explain your greater reality, and your sciences leave you [just] as ignorant about the nature of the universe in which you dwell.

So the book had a private beginning. Jane Roberts’s husband, Robert Butts, wondered about the death of his mother (on November 19, 1973). In a session (the 679th for February 4, 1974) he brought out some old photographs. Now: Life after death has usually been described quite in keeping with the old accepted ideas about one self, and limited concepts of personhood. I took that opportunity, however, to begin this book.

(Pause at 11:51 — then with much emphasis.) The fact is that in life you poise delicately and yet perfectly between realities, and after death you do the same. I used the opportunity, then, to explain the great freedom available to Robert Butts’s mother after death — but also to explain those elements of her reality present during life that had been closed to him consciously because of mankind’s concepts about the nature of the psyche. I comment now and then about photographs that belong to the Butts family [including Jane Roberts], yet any reader can look at old photographs and ask the same questions, applying what is said here to private experience. The “unknown” reality — you are its known equivalent (again, louder). Then know yourself. Your consciousness will expand as you become acquainted with these ideas.