“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

I used that information of Seth’s many times while working with “Unknown” Reality. Even so, I learned that on such a long-term project it’s easy to lose that acute sense of what one really wants to do and show — but I also learned how to constantly renew my focus. This presented me with what seemed like an endless series of challenges, yet I discovered again and again that I enjoyed them: Each time I sat down to work, whether on the most routine short note or the most complicated appendix, I searched for that particular, personal sense of intense concentration on the matter at hand. And each time I achieved it I experienced once more that complete inner and outer, mental and physical, involvement in which time was often significantly negated. These were actual, felt episodes during which I rose above those frustrations mentioned earlier. (I’ve often wondered how much one’s ordinary bodily aging processes are either slowed or superseded during such periods of great focus.)

In important ways, Jane’s work is outside of society’s accepted frameworks — scientific, “occult,” philosophical, or whatever. Not that we dwell upon that comparative isolation much, but we are aware of it. And I know that Jane sometimes misses the kind of camaraderie enjoyed by professionals who fit more comfortably into accepted structures. Actually, though, we consider many of our correspondents as friends, even though we never meet most of them, and despite the fact that Jane can only reply to their cheering communications with Seth’s dictated letter (as well as our own), or with notes scribbled quickly on postcards. We’ve become quite aware of that kind of support, for which we’re very grateful. Many such people are somewhat like us — refusing to accept any kind of dogma.

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.

“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.”

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.