“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.

Let me quickly recap a few more facts about the production of this work. Seth himself always referred to “Unknown” Reality as one unit until we reached the last session. He divided the manuscript into six sections of varying lengths. There are no chapters per se. As Seth explained in the 743rd session: “This book had no chapters [in order] to further disrupt your accepted notions of what a book should be. There are different kinds of organization present, however, and in any given section of the book, several levels of consciousness are appealed to at once.”

Seth also presented the entire work in such a way that the events of our daily lives were intimately connected with his material, serving as personal examples of how his theories actually work in everyday experience. He hadn’t been delivering “Unknown” Reality for long, then, before I realized that I’d have to devise a system of presentation that would handle his material, my own notes (which I could see were going to be considerably longer than they are in Seth’s other books, Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality), excerpts from Jane’s ESP classes, appendixes, and anything else that might be included.

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.

“In my other books I used many accepted ideas as a springboard to lead readers into other levels of understanding. Here, I wish to make it clear that [“Unknown” Reality] will initiate a journey in which it may seem that the familiar is left far behind. Yet when I am finished, I hope you will discover that the known reality is even more precious, more ‘real,’ because you will find it illuminated both within and without by the rich fabric of an ‘unknown’ reality now seen emerging from the most intimate portions of daily life…. Your concepts of personhood are now limiting you personally and en masse, and yet your religions, metaphysics, histories, and even your sciences are hinged upon your ideas of who and what you are. Your psychologies do not explain your own reality to you. They cannot contain your experience. Your religions do not explain your greater reality, and your sciences leave you just as ignorant about the nature of the universe in which you dwell.

“These institutions and disciplines are composed of individuals, each restrained by limiting ideas about their own private reality; and so it is with private reality that we will begin and always return. Period. The ideas in this book are meant to expand the private reality of each reader. They may appear esoteric or complicated, yet they are not beyond the reach of any person who is determined to understand the nature of the unknown elements of the self, and its greater world.”

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.

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.

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.

“In Seth Speaks I tried to describe certain extensions of your own reality in terms that my readers could understand. In The Nature of Personal Reality, I tried to extend the boundaries of individual existence as it is usually experienced … to give the reader hints that would increase practical, spiritual and physical enjoyment and fulfillment in daily life. Those books were dictated by me in a more or less straight narrative style. In ‘Unknown’ Reality I went further, showing how the experiences of the psyche splash outward into the daylight, so to speak. I hope that [in those two books] through my dictation and through Ruburt’s and Joseph’s experiences, the reader can see the greater dimensions that touch ordinary living, and sense the psyche’s greater magic. ‘Unknown’ Reality required much more work on Joseph’s part, and that additional effort in itself was a demonstration that the psyche’s events are very difficult to pin down in time. Seemingly its action goes out in all directions…. As Joseph did his notes, it became apparent that some events … seemed to have no beginning or end.”

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.

“Now: You need not worry about ‘Unknown’ Reality. You have already done the books in another probable reality, and completed them very well.

“Your final paragraphs are already there in the probability, now, that you have chosen. That probability belongs with the present you have now — yet you chose it from an infinite number of other realities. The books arose from probabilities, both yours and mine as well as Ruburt’s.

Now, Jane and I also see much more clearly how our respective characteristics contribute to our joint work. Without Jane’s psychic ability and spontaneity there would be no Seth sessions or books, as I tell her often. Then she tells me that without my persistence and diligence, the Seth material might not have been recorded or correlated, or might exist in a different form entirely. I wonder.

But some others, according to Seth, are uneasy with Jane’s mental independence. In a personal session given for us in 1977, he said: “Some [people] do not want my authority questioned. (Humorously:) They think that if they had their own Supersoul, they would have far better sense than Ruburt; and they would use me as if I were a magic genie. They are afraid that Ruburt might question me out of existence….” He went on to say that such individuals didn’t understand that Jane’s questioning nature fired the sessions’ onset to begin with, and is somewhat responsible for the production of his work and books, as well as her own.

And in one form or another, Jane carries all of those books with her from reality to reality. During an ESP class, Seth called them her “beloved paraphernalia,” or symbols, then continued:

“Some will pick them up and say, ‘What lovely stones,’ and gaze upon them and see what they mean, and others will kick them aside. But in one way or another … those words continue to be spoken, whether through these lips, or through the sound of leaves, or through the invisible music of your own cells. So do they exist. And that is the meaning behind the books and the symbols.”

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:

“In a way, with [this] book and with your art, your purpose is the expression of the ideal, and that expression must be physically materialized, obviously. Your joy, your challenge, should be in the manifestation of the ideal as you see it, whether or not you can in your terms count the consequences or the impediments — whether or not the expression comes to fulfillment in your terms — and even if it seems to fall on ground on which it will not grow.

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.