“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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

It seemed that each time I searched through all of those unpublished sessions (covering well over a decade) for just the right supplementary material, I found something new. More often than not, this made me redo my own notes in unanticipated ways — always a creative challenge that was most enjoyable, and yet, paradoxically, one that at times was very frustrating. Such episodes often caused me to take much longer to produce finished work. I learned a patience that I hadn’t suspected was possible for me. For this patience, employed in conjuring up thoughts and images through words, was objectively and subjectively quite different in quality from that which I was so used to using in producing painted images. I could feel my mind and abilities, using either words or pictures, stretch as a result.

Seth himself helped me out more than once — and others can find his material here useful in many situations. From the 751st session for June 30, 1975, which was held a couple of months after he’d finished his part of the long project: