“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(See Appendix 10 for a summary of Jane’s psychic work in connection with “the affair of the missing person,” as we came to call it. She first encountered the event on the evening the last session, the 691st, was held. I’ve added a few quotes from Jane and Seth to the appendix material.

(On Wednesday, March 27, we received from Jane’s publisher the page proofs for Seth’s second book, The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book.¹ No session was held that night. Actually, correcting the proofs — carefully scrutinizing well over 500 printed pages word by word, checking and rechecking notes, spelling, punctuation, and so forth — kept us so busy that we suspended the next eight scheduled sessions, covering a period of 26 days. Ordinarily Seth would have used those sessions to deliver work on “Unknown” Reality. We disliked interrupting our creative rhythms in that fashion, although in the meantime Jane kept ESP class going as usual, coming through as Seth and as Sumari within that context. And we told ourselves that Seth was perfectly capable of resuming work on “Unknown” Reality whenever we were ready to do so, whether the time lapse involved one week or six months.

(Such was the case, of course. And once again, Seth used a “fresh” event — a dream experience of mine that transpired on the third night following the last session — as a basis for his book dictation tonight.

(On Friday morning March 29, I told Jane that sometime during the previous night I had awakened with the certain knowledge that I’d just finished having two dreams at once. I retained conscious memory of one of them for just a moment before it irrevocably faded. Neither Jane nor I remembered hearing of, or experiencing, what I’ll call double dreaming. I wrote an account of the phenomenon while wondering if I’d distorted some quite ordinary dream happening — and while knowing at the same time that I hadn’t. I decided to ask Seth to discuss the two dreams when we went back to having sessions again, then forgot about them until I got around to rereading my first rough version of these notes last week. [When Seth discusses my “dreams” in this session, however, it turns out that from his perspective he’s able to be more accurate about labeling them than I was.]

(Dreaming two at once led me to write down a second question for Seth. I wanted him to enlarge upon the statement he’d made at 11:29 in the 690th session: “Further developments in your concepts will lead to greater activation in portions of the brain now not nearly utilized, and these in turn will trigger expansions in both psychic and biological terms.” I wondered what connection, if any, might exist between the capacity to have [and/or to remember] more than one dream at a time, and those “portions of the brain now not nearly utilized.”

(I read my two questions to Jane as we waited for tonight’s session to begin. She listened carefully, then said that “there’s something there on the dreams” — meaning that Seth was around, was aware of our conversation, and would probably comment. Actually, Jane had grown very relaxed since suppertime; so much so that she’d considered skipping the session. She decided not to because of the time we’d missed lately. We waited. Jane sipped from a glass of wine. Then, taking off her glasses, she was in trance.)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

To the entity, your own consciousness could be likened to one stream of consciousness, in your terms. The greater part of your own identity, then, is completely aware of all of your conscious and unconscious living material. It is also aware of the same kind of data from all of (its and your) parts.

Because you identify your experience with the regular line of consciousness with which you are familiar, you are rarely able to “bring in” any “other-self” material and hold it while retaining your own sense of identity. Such material may at times bleed or intrude into your own thought, where it blends and is not recognized. In such cases, it takes on the coloration of your own thought patterns. It adds to the overall atmosphere of your being. Without understanding or training, you would have to “lose” your own consciousness in order to perceive the “other-consciousness.”

At certain levels the brain can handle simultaneous material, of course, even though you may be conscious of only a smattering of it. The body is aware of multitudinous simultaneous stimuli that consciously escape you, and is able to act on the information. This includes all kinds of sense data that are not consciously pertinent. (Intently:) Because of the particular kind of ego-orientation that the race decided upon, however, many probabilities of development inherent in the species have been latent. Inherently the physical brain is capable of dealing with more than one main line of consciousness. This does not mean the development of dual personality, by the way. It means the further expansion of the concept of identity: “You” would not only be aware of the you that you have always known, in the same way that you are now, but a deeper sense of identity would also arise.

(10:43. Jane took a few moments to come out of a deep trance. Her delivery had been steady, almost fast. “I have a pretty good idea of what was said,” she told me. “And just before the session, I knew what Seth would say about your dream experience. Not that I could tell you now what he did say — but still I contained that knowledge somehow …” She also knew that the dream event tied in with my question about the “unused” portions of the brain.

(Jane was still very relaxed, so I asked her again if she wanted Seth to say something about her state. She decided to see what developed. Her head kept dipping down; she yawned, blinking; her hands, she said, felt “like water.” At times such signs have marked the beginning of a pronounced altered state of consciousness for her, but she added that she wasn’t going into “a psychedelic experience” now.

(“Okay. Good night, Seth.”

Already it seems that without too much difficulty an investigator could acquire enough material on double dreaming for a most interesting study. The variations mentioned above are intriguing in themselves, and range from an account of an “overlapping double dream” — that is, the individual’s second dream began in the middle of the first one, and extended beyond the end of the first dream — to one in which the dreamer told me, “I knew I’d been having two dreams at once, but I remembered them almost as one dream.”

Sue Watkins is gifted psychically and as a writer. (See the material she wrote for the 594th session, in the Appendix of Seth Speaks. She also appears in Chapter 5 of Jane’s Adventures.) In the opening notes for this session I mentioned a multiple dream experience of Sue’s, and promised to present something here from her description of it. Rather than material on the dreams themselves, I chose the first paragraphs in which Sue outlines the subjective framework of the whole dream event:

And this is the place to mention one of those happy analogies that I’m able to make occasionally (even though in this case it took me several months after I’d had my own little double dream to come up with the very obvious association) — for in our reality, the double or multiple dream happening offers at least a pale insight into the numerous lives that, according to Seth, our entity or whole self experiences simultaneously.

I wrote in the Introductory Notes that I thought Jane’s speed in producing the Seth material was “a close physical approach to, or translation of, Seth’s idea that basically all exists at once — that really there is no time …” I’ll add here that the phenomenon of double dreaming can be another way of approximating the idea of simultaneous time (or lives), about which we as physical creatures always have so many questions.

5. Seth’s first use of “species of consciousness” came after 11:38 in the last session. And added later: He comes up with another evocative phrase, “civilizations of the psyche,” in the 715th session in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. Much of that session can be taken as an extension of his material here on the qualities of consciousness that have existed on the earth. In the 715th session, Seth also lets fall some rather humorous comments on Jane’s own mixed reactions when she first encountered such hints of the “multidimensionality of your beings.”