“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In a waking state, Ruburt found himself in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where he grew up, in what seemed to be a kind of mental projection. (See Jane’s notes at the beginning of the last session.) Everything was gray. The immediate nature of full-blast sense data was missing. Vision was clear but spotty, highly selective. Motion was, however, the strongest sense element. Ruburt was bodiless on the one hand, and on the other he perceived some of the experience through the eyes of an infant in a carriage.

Individuation, however, was dependent upon the cooperation of individuals. As the ego learned to feel more secure, the cooperative tendencies broadened so that the growth of nations was possible. It was inevitable, however, that ego consciousness would produce a reality in which it would finally need, in those terms, to accept other data and information that in the beginning it had to ignore.

The child was himself in the past on the one hand, and yet he was a probable future self in that past. (Pause.) From the standpoint of Ruburt’s official mental focus, and from the standpoint of the neurologically accepted present, that past environment had to remain off-center, or blurred. He could experience it only by sidestepping officially accepted neurological activity. He visited a store that is not at that location “anymore,” and here the sense data were somewhat clearer. He had no conscious memories of the store’s interior, yet it was instantly apparent to him — the dark oiled floor, spread with sawdust. Even the odors were present.

Though the past is actually quite as immediate, alive, and creative as the present is, man made certain adjustments, on several layers, that would focus definite distinctions and set past and present experience apart. While your particular kind of consciousness was developing, it began to intensify selectivity, to concentrate specifically in a small area of activity while blocking out other data. This was necessary because the particular kind of physical manipulation of corporal existence required instant physical response to immediately present stimuli.

(By now Jane was dictating steadily, almost as she does when speaking for Seth.) “Now everything I just said came in a flash while I was waiting for you to write down what you just wrote; but what I got originally was like a ball of string, so that as I explained it the string unraveled into the words …

“I had all kinds of sudden flashes about this when I was doing the dishes (less than half an hour ago) — about Seth’s book, and that in a strange way it was difficult for me to get this book material. It was new, maybe; it would involve concepts that by themselves went against the grain of usual conscious thought, which wants to go consecutively. [...]

(9:10 P.M. Jane began her own dictation before tonight’s session by saying that as she’d typed her statements yesterday [for Appendix 4] she would “get glimpses” of some of the concepts Seth was going to talk about in “Unknown” Reality — yet they would immediately vanish from her consciousness, so that all she had left was the knowledge that she’d experienced the insight.

[...] But from here on I was able to take notes on most of what she said, so the following is pretty close to a verbatim report:)