“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.”

“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.

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.

What Jane has to offer results from the study of consciousness itself, as it’s expressed through her own experience and abilities. By choice, she has no buffers between herself and the exterior world — no assured status, for example. She doesn’t enjoy the protection a scientist does, who probes into a particular subject in depth, then makes a learned report on it from an “objective” position that’s safely outside the field of study. At the same time, I know that Jane feels a responsibility to “publish her results,” and make them available to others. She’s tough in ways that science, for instance, doesn’t understand at all.

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:

“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.

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.