“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.”

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.

Section 3: “The Private Probable Man, the Private Probable Woman, the Species in Probabilities, and Blueprints for Realities” — Nine sessions devoted to the importance of dreams in the creation of “concrete” events from probable ones. This section also includes discussions on the True Dream-Art Scientist, the True Mental Physicist, and the Complete Physician, as well as material on subatomic particles and the spin of electrons in relationship to perceived reality.

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.

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.

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.)

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 your terms — the phrase is necessary — the moment point, the present, is the point of interaction between all existences and reality. All probabilities flow through it, though one of your moment points may be experienced as centuries, or as a breath, in other probable realities of which you are a part.” Thus, just as a moment point can be explored indefinitely, so each newly arising question results in an ever-widening pool of inquiry.

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:

“They are more than symbols, however. They are means of recognition that stand for something else, a reality; signs that stand for words, spoken before the birth of words; words imprinted in molecules; words that were imprinted in other ways before the birth of molecules; and yet (to class members) words that echo within your own individual psyches. In one way or another these words, like pebbles, are left along the beach of your [collective] reality.

“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.”

“When you thoroughly understand what is meant by the entire safe-universe concept, then the physical, cultural climate is seen as a medium through which the ideal can be expressed. The ideal is meaningless if it is not physically manifest to one degree or another. The ideal seeks expression. In so doing, it often seems to change or alter in ways that are not understood. Yet those distortions may be the very openings that allow others to perceive.

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.