“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] 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. [...] 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.

[...] A second group stems from what Seth says, and what we’ve come to believe about what he tells us. [...] As he told us in the 681st session for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality:

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. [...]

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 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.

[...] Seth himself always referred to “Unknown” Reality as one unit until we reached the last session. [...] 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. [...]

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. [...] 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.

“In Seth Speaks I tried to describe certain extensions of your own reality in terms that my readers could understand. In The Nature of Personal Reality, I tried to extend the boundaries of individual existence as it is usually experienced … to give the reader hints that would increase practical, spiritual and physical enjoyment and fulfillment in daily life. [...] In ‘Unknown’ Reality I went further, showing how the experiences of the psyche splash outward into the daylight, so to speak. [...] ‘Unknown’ Reality required much more work on Joseph’s part, and that additional effort in itself was a demonstration that the psyche’s events are very difficult to pin down in time. [...]

“These institutions and disciplines are composed of individuals, each restrained by limiting ideas about their own private reality; and so it is with private reality that we will begin and always return. [...] The ideas in this book are meant to expand the private reality of each reader. [...]

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. [...]

[...] 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.