“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As she often has following recent sessions, after the 685th session Jane discovered herself delivering Seth material in the sleep state. This time her involvement was so vivid and insistent that the next morning I asked her to write her own account of it for a verbatim presentation in this appendix. That request alone had some very interesting and creative results. Jane:)

“February 26, 1974. Since the first session on Seth’s book (the 679th) was held — and before we knew it was a book — I’ve been getting material on it in my sleep after each session. I’ve also done this on a few nights when sessions weren’t held. Last night was different in some way, though now I remember hardly anything. I just know I ‘woke myself up,’ saying rather angrily, ‘My consciousness just can’t handle … this stuff … this way,’ or something like that. I’m sure about the first part of that sentence but not about the last part. The material was on probabilities. I think I saw some of it written down — was I writing it? Anyway, I was getting too much of it at once. I didn’t know … where to put it … or how to express it with my kind of consciousness.

“Now I do recall something: I was getting a whole bunch of material and it was multidimensional. I was confused. I thought part of it went with stuff already given … but in a … probable way. I didn’t see how it could be inserted into a normal manuscript because it had this extra dimension. It was here that I got angry and woke myself up. As I opened my eyes, I realized that the material hadn’t been given yet in ‘Unknown’ Reality — though in the sleep state I was sure it had been.

“The whole thing had been going on for some time before I finally woke up with my objections. Several times earlier I’d awakened also, sat up, and smoked a cigarette. Each time as I lay down again, the material started coming. So the last time I said: ‘Now, look, Seth, if you want to take me to some of these probabilities, great; with you leading the way; but my consciousness is having a hell of a time handling whatever it is we’re doing.’ Then I fell asleep and the material stopped.”

(Within 15 minutes of finishing her statement, Jane spontaneously began writing a second, longer one. She produced it in an altered state of consciousness — albeit a sort of grudging one, as her subsequent notes show. But first the material: She regards its method of reception, as well as its content, as representing breakthroughs of a kind for her, and because both that reception and content are related to “Unknown” Reality we’re presenting considerable portions of the statement here:)

“Usual memory is as much a sifting process as it is anything else, in which experience’s intensity varies — sometimes ‘alive’ neurologically and sometimes not — just to focus our consciousness in one probable action or series. (As I type I add: We forget anything not pertinent to our selected series of probable actions. The psyche knows its own parts. Seth says so in his books, but we ask the psyche the wrong questions.)

“In these side pockets, memory, so-called, is not so structured. Its ever-present living elements are apparent; and its growth. Its material is ever-fresh. Here the past still happens. Usually we experience it through neurological connections; that’s when it seems vivid or alive, but actually it’s that way all the time. Past motion and acts still go on, not recurring — it’s hard to explain — but those past actions are still exploring other probabilities, while our nervous structure focuses us in the one (physical) probable reality we’ve chosen. To us those other actions seem terminated … but that’s only because usually we can’t follow them.

(Now here, Jane told me later, she began moving into a different, hard-to-define, “strange” state of altered awareness. At the same time she began casting her material in the third person. Ruburt, “him,” “he” — entered in; yet [as she was to note in a subsequent statement] she wasn’t picking up on Seth:)

“The ghostly, off-center Saratoga adventure bypassed and blurred usual neurological processes, allowing him to slip through. The blurring is — was — also necessary to aid in distinguishing another reality from the normally accepted one, particularly in the beginning of such activity. He was tuning into probable neurological materializations … that are ghost images inherent in the normal nervous structure … latent connections biologically part of the cells’ realities. He was moving into other selectivities. Actual complete impact is unlikely under most conditions, though various degrees of interception and intermixing can occur.

“Ruburt’s difficulty, anger, and impatience last night³ resulted from initial problems of translating multidimensional experience into linear terms and thought patterns. Fresh material was being born anew in the past, and he didn’t know how to fit it into his time scheme.”

(Here in the last paragraph, then, is a pertinent clue, and one that Jane arrived at without asking Seth: She’s experienced such translation challenges often since beginning “Unknown” Reality — hence her talk before many of these sessions [from the 679th on] about attaining that “certain clear focus,” or “the one clearest place in consciousness,” before she began speaking for Seth.

“Toward the end of the material (in the second statement) I briefly thought the Seth level might be involved, but the wording didn’t come through as automatically and smoothly as it does with Seth, and I didn’t feel his … personality. The information referred to me as Ruburt, though, which automatically meant that it was from a ‘higher’ or other level than the Ruburt one. Yet I dislike the connotations called up by my use of the word ‘higher’ here.

“Actually I think today’s experience was a different kind of approach to what happened to me when I was sleeping last night … After reading over all of this material, I see that on both occasions I was experimenting with the process it describes — trying to dip directly into a ‘sidepool’ of data and bypass usual neural connections.”

(There’s much to be learned here, Jane said in conclusion, providing she can find the time for study. An interesting question: According to the feelings she expressed toward the end of her third statement, Seth himself evidently isn’t represented by [or called out of] such a sidepool of consciousness — yet what sort of connection might, or does, he have with one? We haven’t asked yet.)