INTRODUCTORY NOTES
BY ROBERT F. BUTTS

The two volumes making up The “Unknown” Reality: A Seth Book, were dictated by my wife, Jane Roberts, in cooperation with Seth, the nonphysical “energy personality essence” for whom she speaks when she’s in trance. I wrote in the Introductory Notes for Volume 1 that Jane began delivering “Unknown” Reality (as we soon came to call it) in the 679th session for February 4, 1974, and finished it with the 744th session for April 23, 1975. She produced the two books in an accumulated trance time of about 90 hours — an accomplishment that I think quite remarkable.

It isn’t necessary to repeat many more of the Introductory Notes for Volume 1 here, although I’ll ask the reader to review them in connection with the material presented below. But the most important thing about those notes, I think, is Jane’s own account of her subjective relationship with Seth.

Certainly Seth is saying that Jane’s books (and his) represent her acknowledgment of and search for an ideal. So do my own efforts in life. (See Seth’s material on “ideals set in the heart of man” in sessions 696–97 for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality.) Apropos of such concepts, I’ll close these introductory notes by quoting from a personal session Seth gave for Jane and me, in which he reiterates the importance of the individual and the pursuit of the ideal. Seth initiated the following passages by talking to me about “the safe universe” that each person can create, and live within. Although his words were directed to me, they have a broad general application:

I hope these Introductory Notes have prepared the reader to take up “Unknown” Reality in the middle, more or less, with the 705th session. But as I wrote in introducing Volume 1, whatever comments I make along the way will explain Jane’s trance performances from my view, as best I can offer them — her behavior while she’s “under,” the varied, powerful or muted use of her voice as she speaks for Seth, her stamina and humor in sessions, the speed or slowness of her delivery. But above all I try to help the reader appreciate the uncanny feeling of energy and/or intelligence — of personality — in the sessions, as exemplified by and through Seth; conscious energy, then, taking a guise that’s at least somewhat comprehensible to us, in our terms of reality, so that we can understand what’s happening.