“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The accumulated material further added to the length of the work, which was considerable. Finally we chose to divide “Unknown” Reality into two volumes. This meant that our readers could have access to part of the manuscript while I was preparing the rest. Seth agreed with our decision.

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.

Seth’s Preface is in Volume 1, of course, and it too should be studied again; to me, such acts of referral between the two volumes help the reader mentally unite them.

After I touch upon the contents of Volume 1, I’ll have the freedom to move into some other topics that occurred to Jane and me as I put Volume 2 together — subjects regarding the Seth phenomenon itself, for example. I also want to present a few passages from both regular and private (or “deleted”) sessions that were held before, during, or after Seth-Jane’s actual production of “Unknown” Reality in its entirety. At least some of Jane’s other books will be mentioned occasionally.

Seth often advances his ideas by weaving together several themes into a complex pattern in any given session, or throughout a body of material. This process can also result in a similar approach on my part when I discuss his dictation, so I’ll initiate a summary of Volume 1 by using four sources presented by Seth himself: a key passage from his Preface; the headings he gave for the three sections that comprise Volume 1, along with a few elaborations of my own; a brief description of the appendixes which I assembled over a period of time; and a passage from the 762nd session, in which, eight months after he’d finished “Unknown” Reality, Seth speaks further about his purposes in producing it.

Now these quotations are from Seth’s Preface (for Volume 1):

Where do the events of our lives begin or end? Where do we fit into them, individually and as members of the species? These questions, with Seth’s explanations, are the heart of Volume 1. Because “Unknown” Reality is organized along intuitive rather than consecutive lines, though, it’s difficult to provide a brief résumé. Jane probably described Volume 1 as simply as possible, however, when she said: “Volume 1 provides the general background and information upon which the exercises and methods in Volume 2 depend.” I quoted that statement in Volume 1’s Epilogue, and now, after finishing my own work on the entire manuscript, I realize how truly apropos it is.

The first volume, like this one, defies easy description, then, since it leaps over many definitions we usually take for granted; and with its lack of chapter divisions it even confounds our ideas of what a book is. Yet it certainly contains a most intriguing, multidimensional view of the nature of probabilities, a view in which our ideas of a “simple, single event” must vanish; at least we can never again look at any event as being concrete, finished, or absolute. Seth stresses the importance of probabilities as they exist in relationship to a thought, an ordinary physical event, or the mass event of Homo sapiens as a species, and emphasizes the existence of probable realities as the understructure of free will.

His headings for the three sections of Volume 1 do give some indication of its contents.

Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality concludes with 11 appendixes compiled from Seth sessions related to the book’s subject matter. These are supplemented by notes regarding the relationship involving Seth, Jane, and myself, and by other pertinent material that throws light upon the larger framework in which these sessions take place. I also provided a certain number of cross references, directing the reader to connected passages in Seth’s and/or Jane’s other books.

To me, some of the most important material in Volume 1 is Jane’s information on her sensing of other neurological pulses as they’re connected with probable events, and how she picked up those pulses by bypassing her direct, or ordinary neurological impact. See her work in appendixes 4 and 5. Seth also discussed such neurological changeovers in Session 685, among others. I think this kind of material offers a rich source for future scientific investigation.

This present book, Volume 2, goes on from there as Seth creates an intriguing thematic framework, and then invites us to “play along,” to join in and to discover the unknown reality for ourselves through a series of exercises geared to illuminate the inner structures upon which our exterior ones depend.

Later in these notes I plan to return to Seth’s point about the psyche’s events and time. In any case, I finished preparing Volume 1 for publication in January 1977, and it appeared in print later that year. We were delighted that the public could take advantage of part of the material while I made the second volume ready. The days and weeks I spent working on my notes for Volume 2 began to pile up into months, however, and I became more and more concerned.

It seemed that I should have finished my part of both books long ago, even though simultaneously I was working on several other projects with Jane, as well as painting a few hours a day. Finally, the disparity between the time Seth-Jane had spent producing Volume 1 alone (around 45 hours), and my own commitment in ordinary time, became so great in my mind as to be almost overwhelming.

I also felt that the chronology of presentation for both Seth’s and Jane’s books was being distorted: Because I was so slow in finishing my work on Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, Jane published her Psychic Politics first, for example, when the reverse order should have prevailed. After all, I told myself innumerable times, these were Seth’s and Jane’s books, not mine. I wasn’t hesitant about recognizing my own role in helping Jane’s psychic abilities show themselves in a consistent way (as, say, in intuitively devising the session format for the presentation of the Seth material). But that recognition didn’t make me feel any better.

Jane insisted that the notes were important, as a constant reminder to the reader that psychic or inner events happen in the context of daily life. Sometimes I thought she was simply being kind in so reassuring me. Seth too agreed that the notes, appendixes, and other additions were pertinent. He also stressed that our plan to divide the work was intuitively correct, and based on legitimate inner knowledge. This cheered me considerably, of course. (However, the decision to publish in two volumes, made when “Unknown” Reality was almost finished, caused me to rewrite most of my original notes for it with that new presentation in mind.)

The whole adventure has certainly been a learning experience, one demanding a kind of forbearance that neither Jane nor I could have really anticipated. If the waiting until I finished with Volume 2 has been difficult for me, it’s been doubly so for Jane, since by nature she’s much more spontaneous and quick than I am. Yet the wait itself was creative. As I show below, putting this Volume 2 together has represented a process of discovery for me — just as I hope studying it will for the reader.

Questions, questions, questions — why do Jane and I have so many of them? First, the very nature of her abilities leads to hosts of them, in ways that would have been entirely unexpected earlier in our lives. A second group stems from what Seth says, and what we’ve come to believe about what he tells us. A third set arises from the reactions of others to the first two, through the letters and calls we receive and the questions of people knocking on our doors. In spite of all this, we’ve found that any one group of questions amplifies or adds to those related to the other two categories — i.e., like energy regenerating itself, the questions automatically proliferate. Many times I’ve had the idea that a good analogy here is furnished by Seth’s concept of the “moment point.” As he told us in the 681st session for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality:

In my notes introducing Volume 1, I wrote about placing the basic “artistic ideas” embodied in the Seth material at our conscious, aesthetic, and practical service in daily life. That’s really what Seth’s work is all about, in my opinion. Such an endeavor essentially involves the pursuit of an ideal, and represents our attempts to give physical and mental shape to the great inner, creative commotion of the universe that each person intuitively feels. Of course Jane and I want Seth’s ideas and our own to touch responsive reflexes within others; then each individual can use the material in his or her own expression of that useful ideal, letting it serve to stimulate inner perceptions.

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.

As in Volume 1, notes are presented at session break times as always, but I’ve indicated the points of origin of what would ordinarily be footnotes by using consecutive (superscription) numbers within the text of each session. Then, I’ve grouped the actual notes at the end of the individual sessions for quick consultation. All such reference numbers are printed in the same small type throughout both volumes. Footnotes will be found “in place” only when they’re used to call attention to a specific appendix in the same book. For the most part, then, these approaches keep the body of each session free of interruptions between break designations.

The appendix idea worked out well in The Seth Material and in Seth Speaks, and in both volumes of “Unknown” Reality each excerpt or session in an appendix, with whatever notes it might carry, is usually fairly complete in itself. These pieces can be read at any time, but I’d rather the reader went over each one when it’s first mentioned in a footnote; just as he or she ought to check out all other reference material in order throughout both volumes. I think it especially informative to compare Jane’s Psychic Politics with Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, for she produced large sections of both works concurrently; there are many interesting exchanges of viewpoint between the two.