“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]

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 From Seth and ourselves we’ve accumulated much unpublished material about Jane’s symptoms and attendant matters.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….”

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.

[...] As events worked out, Seth was halfway through Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality before I realized that these supplementary notes would work well as the first appendix in the first volume. [...] As in the Introductory Notes, I want to stress Jane’s role as the creative artist, disseminating her personal view of a larger inner reality, and her intuitive and conscious comprehension of at least some aspects of that reality; for such understanding can easily elude our Western-oriented, materialistic, technological outlook.

[...] No matter whether it’s natural or not …” Rather reluctantly, she agreed to let me present that personal material here; but only, I think, because she understood my desire to give what I consider to be pertinent background material for the Seth books. [...]

[...] I added that within those religious boundaries, mystics across the centuries and throughout the world have given voice to the same ideas in almost the same words, and that as an “independent” mystic Jane was in a position to approach the situation from a freer; more individual standpoint: She would be able to add fresh insights to what is certainly one of the species’ all-pervasive, unifying states. [...]

[...] Maybe that’s all I’m responsible for — odd thought — what else did I, do I, feel responsible for? [...]