YOU AND THE “UNKNOWN” REALITY

(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]

He was always highly imaginative, as was his mother. His mother was socially defiant, flaunting her beauty with the “disreputable” elements of society. Much later, Ruburt would date the “disreputable” men in his environment, yet neither mother or daughter saw that parallel. Ruburt’s mother by then wanted a respectable, hopefully rich husband for Ruburt, and could not understand why he chose men who did not conform.

He remembered his mother’s constant criticism of him, but barely recalls his scandalized disapproval of her swearing, for example, on his return home. He threw himself headlong into the Catholic reality, pursued it with great stubborn diligence, used it as a framework of conventionality in which he could allow his mystic nature to grow.

(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.

She had forced herself to contain her own reality in conventional terms — but to her way of thinking, he refused to use his energy in the accepted social and financial structure that each of them had accepted.

You would make your creativity real, in sense terms. Linden would not. He would keep it safely inside a “play” structure — not play necessarily in basic terms, but a structure in which he would work with models, cleverly, never applying his creative abilities in certain ways to a practical reality. They would be outside, safely, in that context.

(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.

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.

Always, when Jane and I present personal material in “Unknown” Reality, we have several things in mind. We not only want to give necessary background information relative to the sessions themselves, but to offer glimpses into the very complicated emotional and physical forces that lie beneath close long-term relationships. We think Seth’s comments about our situations can help the reader better understand his or her own beliefs, motives, and desires.

8. As Seth, Jane delivered several excellent pages of material on her physical symptoms in the 645th session for March 5, 1973, in Chapter 11 of Personal Reality.

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….”

10. I gave up my commitment to commercial art in 1953, when I was 34 years old. My intuitive desire to do so had been growing slowly for several years. The act of separation finally became conscious and deliberate when I moved to a small community near Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (where Jane lived), to temporarily help an artist-writer friend produce a syndicated “comic” strip. This was the last commercial work I was to do for some time; I finally understood that I was simply more interested in painting pictures than in doing anything else. Since I believe that each of us creates our own reality in the most precise terms, it can hardly be a coincidence that at this time of decision my friend introduced Jane and me — for she was just as devoted to writing as I was to painting.