“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

As Seth continued dictation I was fired by his purpose to make the unknown elements of human life at least partially visible — an audacious goal, I thought — and I tried to do my part in recording all such disclosures as they appeared in our lives and were reflected in the experiences of our friends and students.

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.

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.

Section 1: “You and the ‘Unknown’ Reality” — Nine sessions describing how probabilities merge with the events of our private lives.

Section 2: “Parallel Man, Alternate Man, and Probable Man: The Reflection of These in the Present, Private Psyche. Your Multidimensional Reality in the Now of Your Being” — Eight sessions dealing with the vast unknown origin of our species in a psychological past that by contrast makes evolutionary time look like yesterday.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

In Jane’s case, at least, the role of the “medium” (or of the investigator or initiator) is extremely challenging. It’s also arduous: In our Western societies it’s much more comforting to grapple with chemistry, say, or farming or salesmanship, or with any of numerous other “practical” jobs or disciplines, than it is to confront the inner senses.

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.

“In your mind you creatively envision the ideal — the sanity of some future culture that, you hope, our work and [that of] others will bring about. If not tomorrow, then sometime.

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.