“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(To me, both photographs had a certain mysterious quality that I’d often found intriguing — an aura due partly to their being old, personal, and so irreplaceable, I suppose. But for a long time I’d been aware of other feelings connected with them. Jane had begun delivering the Seth material late in 1963, and soon afterwards Seth started developing his ideas on probabilities.¹ Many times while looking at the snapshots since then I’d found myself speculating about the probable realities surrounding their two young subjects. I told Jane now that I understood the course of action each of us had chosen to make physical, or “real” in our terms. But what of all the other paths our probable selves had embarked upon since those pictures had been taken? By now, did those photographs actually depict the immature images of us, the Jane and Rob we knew and had always been, or from our standpoint did they show a probable Jane, a probable Rob — two individuals who long ago had set out upon their own journeys through other realities? I wasn’t clear on what I wanted to know, and had trouble expressing myself to Jane. Maybe I just wanted Seth to comment on probabilities in a more personal way. [And added later: At the time, I had no idea that my questioning would trigger a new Seth book.²]

The conditions, however, while “set” in one fashion, are highly plastic in another, so that a multitudinous variety of probable events can flow from them. Precognitively you are unconsciously quite aware — again in your terms — of the results of any given action or cause. When this (photograph) of Ruburt³ was taken, he had already become aware of the overall interests and concerns that would dominate his future life, although the particular course of it had not been chosen.

(I reminded her that I hoped Seth would comment on the old photograph of her in connection with probable realities, although now I could see that it would take him longer to develop answers than I’d thought it would. I didn’t think we’d get any material on my own picture tonight.

Now: You were correct. Probabilities are of course involved. Remember the first few sentences of this session. The general overall conditions were chosen, but many probable courses were concerned.

In your terms, the intersection with probabilities occurred one day in an interview the child had with a priest. The event, in Ruburt’s terms, with its results in your probability, is mentioned in his Rich Bed (see Note 4). The child in seventh or eighth grade wrote a poem, expressing the desire to be a nun, and brought it to a parish priest. In your probability, the priest told the child that she was needed by her mother; but intuitively he saw that Ruburt’s mysticism would not fit into the church organization.

In the other probability, Ruburt’s desire at that time won. He managed to water down the extent and dimensions of his mysticism enough so that it was acceptable. In that other probability, there will be no long period of time in which the mystical experience would lie latent, and no necessity at all to put it into new terms.

He could not accept a new framework, and he dared not let the old one go, so the symptoms became the physical materialization of these conflicts, and served many purposes. This child (in the photo), grown up in its own probability, has no such problems. The challenges are not there, either — only in latent form.

(From Seth’s delivery following last break, I’ve deleted less than two short sentences of very personal material. Obviously, Jane and I did choose to meet the challenges presented by the emergence of her psychic abilities 11 years ago. Those “new” abilities offered creative possibilities so apparent that, given our natures, we had little desire to do otherwise; beneath our doubts and questions we intuitively felt the rightness of our decisions. I found that I was able to contribute psychically in certain ways, other than just recording the sessions. And to have at least some of our deepest desires and motivations brought so clearly to conscious awareness, through psychic means or any other way, was more than we’d thought possible in previous years. We found such information especially valuable within the larger social context. With all of this, I was also eager to acquire whatever knowledge was available about both the philosophy and the art of painting.

(After a pause at 12:02, Seth delivered a page of material for Jane before ending the session at 12:16 A.M. As I interpret his information on the photographs, then, Jane’s depicts an individual who was to become a probable Jane to the one I know, while mine is pretty much an early version of the self who’s always lived in this reality …)

1. Seth tells us that all actions are initially mental in nature. Very simply, probable realities flow from the multitudinous actions — or events — we may envision, but choose not to actualize physically. But any motion of ours remains quite valid once it’s conceived, and is carried out in all of its variations by probable selves in other realities. There can be communication between at least some of these worlds. Jane has had a modest success in touching upon a few of her probable selves, and plans to write about those experiments and others she hopes to conduct.

Seth, in his material on probable systems in Chapter 16 of Seth Speaks, says: “The soul can be described for that matter as a multidimensional, infinite act, each minute probability being brought somewhere into actuality and existence; an infinite creative act that creates for itself infinite dimensions in which fulfillment is possible.”

Then see Chapter 15 of The Seth Material: Probable Selves and Probable Systems of Reality.

2. Indeed, Jane was to hold several sessions before we realized that Seth had begun a new book — see the 683rd session in this section. Seth had finished Personal Reality over six months ago. We suspended our regular sessions after that, yet were as busy as ever. My mother died in November, 1973. For some months we’d known her death was coming, and so had arranged our affairs around that irrevocable event; I spent weeks preparing the final manuscript of Personal Reality for the publisher; Jane conducted her ESP class whenever she could, and worked on her two books, Adventures in Consciousness and Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time. She also gave a number of private Seth sessions for the two of us on a variety of subjects. We ended up calling a portion of one of those the 678th session and added it to our records, since the material, which Jane received at my request, concerned probabilities and Jerusalem. We hope to publish it some day.

In a very simplified summary from Rich Bed: Jane was the only child of Marie Burdo and Delmer Roberts. She was 2 years old when her parents were divorced in 1931. With her daughter, the young Marie then returned to her own parents, and the home that the family had rented for a number of years: half of a double dwelling in a poor neighborhood in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Marie began experiencing the early stages of rheumatoid arthritis, but worked as much as possible.

It’s taken us some years to understand that behind Jane’s symptoms lay her efforts to understand and express the very strong creative energy she’s sensed within herself since childhood. Yet the conflict that developed between her writing self and her mystical self, as explained by Seth in Personal Reality, was only one facet of her intuitive drive toward that expression: As Jane matured, she realized that there were other challenges for her to contend with too. Among them were the resolution of some old family relationships — and nowhere in this note am I talking about past lives or probable lives, but just the working out of hard questions rooted in this present physical reality. From Seth and ourselves we’ve accumulated much unpublished material about Jane’s symptoms and attendant matters. The bulk of it is often applicable to others, and eventually she may write a book about the whole subject. Should she do so, it would certainly be a history of one person’s long efforts to grapple as fully as possible — and not always successfully — with her own human qualities. But I also think that in many ways it would be her most illuminating work. She fully accepts the idea that she creates her own reality.

Seth has discussed the members of the Butts family at times, including some of their reincarnational aspects. Six months before starting “Unknown” Reality, however, he made a few remarks that I’ve applied ever since to life in our physical reality: “Each person chooses his or her parents, accepting in terms of environment and heredity a bank of characteristics, attitudes, and abilities from which to draw in physical life. There is always a reason, and so each parent will represent to each child an unspeakable symbol, and often the two parents will represent glaring contrasts and different probabilities, so that the child can compare and contrast divergent realities … Your two brothers also chose the family situation. Each parent [both of whom are now deceased] represented opposites to them — but individual ones, and so they saw your parents differently [than you did]. Do not lose contact with them….”