“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

What I am about to explain is difficult. Purposely, it is not as yet in any of the books, simply because certain beliefs must be dispensed with before these ideas can be at all accepted.

It is not that I am holding back so much as that, in your terms, what follows is dependent upon an understanding of concepts presented earlier. People who are still worrying about one soul, gods, and devils, must be helped to relate to greater realities from their own framework, and gently led away from it if possible. Probabilities have been mentioned in such a way that alternate realities are presented, showing such people that choices are available.

All probable worlds exist now. All probable variations on the most minute aspect in any reality exist now. You weave in and out of probabilities constantly, picking and choosing as you go along. The cells within your body do the same thing.

(A one-minute pause at 9:50, head bowed, eyes closed.) The organizations of consciousness “grow” even as cells grow into organs. Groups of probable selves, then, can and do form their own identity structure, which is quite aware of the probable selves involved. In your reality, experience is dependent upon time, but all experience is not so structured. There are, for example, parallel events that are followed as easily as you follow consecutive events.

(10:00.) Such endless creativity can seem so dazzling that the individual would appear lost within it,² yet consciousness forms its own organizations and psychic interactions at all levels. Any consciousness automatically tries to express itself in all probable directions, and does so. In so doing it will experience All That Is through its own being, though interpreted, of course, through that familiar reality of its own. You grow probable selves as a flower grows petals. Each probable self, however, will follow through in its own reality — that is, it will experience to the fullest those dimensions inherent to it. You pick and choose one birth and one death, in your terms.

Science likes to think that it deals with predictable action. It perceives such a small amount of data, however, and in such a limited area, that the great inner unpredictability of any molecule, atom, or wave is not apparent. Scientists perceive only what appears within your system, and that often appears predictable.

Give us a moment … True order and organization, even of biological structure, can be achieved only by granting a basic unpredictability. I am aware that this sounds startling. Basically, however, the motion of any wave or particle or entity is unpredictable — freewheeling and undetermined. Your life structure is a result of that unpredictability. Your psychological structure is also. However, because you are presented with a fairly cohesive picture, in which certain laws seem to apply, you think that the laws come first and physical reality follows. Instead, the cohesive picture is the result of the unpredictable nature that is and must be basic to all energy.

Statistics provide an artificial, predetermined framework in which your reality is then examined. Mathematics is a theoretical organized structure that of itself imposes your ideas of order and predictability. Statistically, the position of an atom can be theorized, but no one knows where any given atom is at any given time.⁴

In your terms — the phrase is necessary — the moment point,⁵ the present, is the point of interaction between all existences and reality. All probabilities flow through it, though one of your moment points may be experienced as centuries, or as a breath, in other probable realities of which you are a part.

The cells are also aware of probabilities in a more familiar fashion than you are, as they manipulate the past and future history of the body. Ruburt now, again, is experiencing massiveness, as in your idea of probabilities the cellular structure feels its vast endurance. Working with events not even real to you, it produces a physical structure that maintains identity and predictability out of a vastly creative network. That network is unpredictable, yet from it Ruburt can predictably put ashes into that shell. (Jane held up her favorite ashtray, the abalone shell we’d found in Baja California in 1958, and tapped some ashes into it from her cigarette.) The predictability of that gesture rests upon the basis of an unpredictability, in which multitudinous other actions could have occurred, and in other realities do occur.

Now: Your beliefs and intents cause you to pick, from an unpredictable group of actions, those that you want to happen. You experience those events. (To me:) “Your” desire to live straddled the death of the child in an operation. The child’s desire to die chose that event. People are as free as atoms are. Give us a moment … In no way could you predict what would happen to the child in that photograph of yourself.⁶ In no way now can you “predict” what will happen to you now. You can choose to accept as your reality any number of given unpredictable events. In that respect, the choice is yours, but all the events you do not accept occur nevertheless.

In a very small measure you can see how this works when you think of your mother in, say, her last years, and compare your idea of her with those of [your brothers] Linden and Richard. She was a different person to each of you. She was herself; but in the interweavings of probabilities, while certain agreed-upon historic events were accepted, she admitted into her reality whatever portions of your probable reality she chose. Each of you had a different mother.

Probabilities intersect then in your experience, and their intersection you call reality. Biologically and psychically these are intersections, coming-togethers, consciousness adopting a focus.

(Long pause at 11:05.) Part of Ruburt’s feeling of massiveness comes from the mass experience of the body, existing all at once. Therefore to him the body feels larger. Calculations impossible to describe occur, so that from this basic unpredictability you experience what seem to be predictable actions. This is only because you focus upon those actions that “make sense” in your reality, and ignore all others. I am not speaking symbolically, of course, when I say you died as a youngster. Nor was any harsh reality forced upon the mother by the dying child, for that portion of your mother was the part that regretted having had the child.

(11:17. Jane smiled as I called her again. “I just got the image of being a giant in a giant room. Then something I don’t understand: an image of myself as a gorilla, or something like that. I’m as tall as the ceiling, trying to knock the walls down … I’m not understanding what’s going on very well. Now I’m getting bigger. I think I’m going to come out of it … My face isn’t doing anything, is it? Changing in any way?”

(11:21. “I had the feeling of my hair being long and parted in the middle, as though I’ve got some kind of humanoid features; you know, with the hair hanging down on each side of my face, which is something like an animal’s — but with very intelligent eyes, very warm and soft.”⁸ Jane finally opened her eyes. Her ears still rang, so loudly that she asked me if I heard the same sound. I told her I didn’t. We walked around the room. I made her half a sandwich. “It’s sort of frustrating,” she said. “It’s as though I’m seeing or feeling what I’m capable of at the moment, but I know there’s more there behind that. I can feel it, but I can’t get it out.”

From the “chaotic” bed of your dreams springs your ordered daily organized action. In your reality, the behavior of your consciousness and of your molecules are highly connected. Your type of consciousness presupposes a molecular consciousness, and your kind of consciousness is inherent in molecular consciousness — inherent within your system, but not basically predictable. Predictability is simply another word for significance. Unpredictability, looking at itself in a variety of different fashions, finds certain portions of itself significant, and forms certain orders, or ordered sequences, about itself. In one of our very early sessions, I told you that you perceive from a vast field only certain data that you find meaningful. That data could only arise from the bed of unpredictability. Only unpredictability can provide the greatest source of probable orders.

In dreams you are acquainted with probable events, from which you then choose; (to me:) so before you died as a child, you knew that you could pick or choose that death. In greater terms you chose both life and death, and the picture of you at the age of 16⁹ was never taken in one reality.

2. Long before this, Seth was concerned that Jane said I might feel insignificant once we attempted to grasp the endless ramifications of consciousness as he was explaining them to us. As he said in the 29th session for February 26, 1964: “Later I will attempt to show you where the boundaries are — though (with a laugh) there really are no boundaries — that form a variety of such planes [realities] into a sphere of relation in which, to some extent, cause-and-effect operates as you understand it. Beyond that for a long time there will be no need for me to go any more deeply. I will speak of the entity, the personalities, the reincarnations, the diverse personality fragment groupings, the planes with which you are similar or can understand, and ultimately try to deal with your questions, implied if not spoken, as to where entities came from to begin with.

“… Needless to say, I wanted you to know that there is much more than even this, complexities that are truly astounding, intelligences that operate in what I suppose you would call a gestalt fashion, building blocks of vitalities of truly unbelievable maturity, awareness, and comprehension. These are the near ultimate [as I understand such things] .

3. According to Seth, then, in one probability I failed to survive the operation I underwent for appendicitis in this reality when I was 11 years old. My second probable death took place sometime during the years of my military service (1943–46) in World War II. It’s interesting to note that Seth says I was a pilot, and hence an officer, in that probability. In the reality I know, I served in the ATC — the Air Transport Command — as an aircraft instrument specialist and mechanic, with the rank of staff sergeant. While on duty in some of the remote islands of the Pacific, however, I managed to get in some flying time, though not as a pilot.

5. Seth’s concept of the moment point is implicit in his material as I quote it in Note 1 for this session. Also see the 514th session in Chapter 2 of Seth Speaks, and the 668th session in Chapter 19 of Personal Reality.

“These choices, however, are based upon your changing perception of past and present. Because I have a larger scope of perception than you, I can with greater facility predict what may happen. But this is dependent upon my prediction as to which choice [of probable events] you will make, and the choice is still your own … Predictions, per se, do not contradict the theory of free will, though free will is dependent upon much more than any freedom of the ego alone. If the ego were allowed to make all the choices, with no veto power from other layers of the self, you would all be in a sad position indeed.

7. As an artist, my intuitive reaction to Seth’s remark that an atom can move in more than one direction at once was to associate that ability with his notions of simultaneous time and probabilities. The artist, since he isn’t any kind of a scientist (even though he might be interested in science in general), attempts to grapple with the statement as best he can, in light of the feeling he has for what Seth is trying to say. At the same time he realizes that from his artistic viewpoint he may not be able to understand the paradox of “contradictory” motions.

8. Jane’s assertion tonight that she felt a humanoid aspect of herself reminded me of the material she’d given almost a year ago in Chapter 12 of Personal Reality, on “the idea of natural therapy in animals,” and animal medicine men. She came up with that information on her own, too, and during a session break. On that occasion she was more of an observer. There was quite a difference in “physical size” between the images she had seen then and her visions of herself this evening; yet there were similarities also, for of that earlier experience she said “I saw creatures who walked upright — hairy, with brilliant compassionate eyes …” See the 648th session at 11:30.

9. On facing pages in our album, Jane and I have a pair of large, rather formal photographs of ourselves that we’ve often joked about. As it happened we looked at them earlier this evening. Both of them were taken in 1936. Jane, in her photograph, is 6½ years old. I’m 16 in mine, and one year short of finishing high school. More than once Jane has asked me what I’d have thought at that age had I been aware that my wife-to-be was a “round-faced little kid, still playing with paper dolls….”