“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I’ll open this appendix by referring to a pair of short notes I wrote for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality. First, Note 6 for Session 686: “We’re still acquiring information about the psychic connections between Jane and Seth, of course. Even now, more than 10 years after Jane began speaking for Seth, one might say that each session we hold represents another step in this learning process; we fully expect it to continue as long as the sessions do.” Then, Note 3 for the 688th session contains my statement that in an appendix for Session 711, “I assemble from various sessions information on the complex relationships involving Jane-Ruburt-Seth [and also Rob-Joseph].”

3. In Chapter 3 of The Seth Material Jane describes our use of the Ouija board in the early sessions. In the 8th session for December 15, 1963, she began dictating portions of each session; by the 14th session, she was delivering verbally all of Seth’s material except for an opening remark or two obtained through the board. A month after that we dispensed with the board entirely.

26. Although in that 1971 class Seth stressed his experiences with the human condition through reincarnation, in 1964 he’d had this to say: “To me this [reincarnational and family material] is all so obvious that I almost hesitate to mention it, but this is because I tend to forget what human experience on your plane actually involves.” (See the excerpts from the 27th session in this appendix.) In that early session Seth spoke to me alone; in class he faced a large group. I’d say that from his position or focus as an “energy personality essence” both attitudes are true, rather than contradictory — and that one or the other predominated according to the circumstances and subject matter of the session involved. I don’t think the time gap between the two sessions — seven years — was a factor.

Since this session was held almost 13 months after “Unknown” Reality was completed, I can look back and note that Seth developed the statement on reincarnation in his material on counterparts; this begins with Session 721 in Section 5. Appendix 21 grew out of that session. In that same section, the 725th session (with Note 4) contains additional information on particles, identities, and psychological gestalts.

(First I thought of Seth’s assertion in the 92nd session for September 28, 1964, that “trees have their dreams”; [in Volume 1, see the quotations in Note 1 for Session 698]. Then I remembered that he’d come through with extensive material on tree consciousness in a much earlier session. With Jane’s help the next day I found that information in the 18th session, which had been held on January 22, 1964. Most of that session is unpublished, although someday we’d like to print it in full. [...]

(Next, the subject matter of the 18th session led me to recall that Seth had also discussed trees several years later. But this time, in spite of my system of indexing each session in at least a fairly adequate fashion, several days passed before I found the passage I wanted. Discovering it involved a patient combing of many sessions and notes. [If the indexes listed everything in detail, they’d end up being almost as long as the sessions themselves.] The search was worth it, though; now I had the key phrase I’d associated with Seth’s remark in Session 708. [...]

(FOR SESSION 708)

(Seth, then, in the 453rd session for December 4, 1968:)

(Now to recap the situation leading up to tonight’s [612th] session: At supper time Jane encountered some relaxation effects⁶ — so much so, in fact, that she had to lay down briefly in the midst of preparing the meal. Then not long before the session was due she became aware to some extent of her pyramid sensation, meaning that Seth Two, or possibly a variation of that personality gestalt, was around. [...] Many things, it seemed, were developing at once; we expected that after first break tonight Seth would comment upon them, as well as upon Monday evening’s session. [...] Jane carried the rest of the session herself — and a unique one it turned out to be….

In Note 1 for Session 709 I wrote that “Tachyons … are supposed faster-than-light particles that are thought to be possible within Einstein’s special theory of relativity.” (In the session itself Seth makes some intriguing references to related possibilities: “In out-of-body states, consciousness can travel faster than light — often, in fact, instantaneously.” Also see Note 2.) In the 682nd session for Volume 1, while discussing his CU’s, or units of consciousness, Seth told us: “Of course they move faster than light.” Then see notes 3 and 4 for that session.

I remind the reader of a remark Seth made in the 702nd session for Volume 1, when Jane was delivering material for him on electron spin and related concepts: “Ruburt’s vocabulary is not an official scientific one. [...] The material in this session is a good example of her approach. We’ve never tried to get her — or Seth — to deliver mathematical or chemical formulas during a session; it’s not her thing. However, she thinks that if she were to motivate herself she could accomplish something through the formalized language of mathematics, say, but that in the beginning at least she’d acquire the information visually; then she would write it down, even while the session was in progress….

(With Seth’s help Jane first encountered the idea of Seth Two in the 406th session for April 22, 1968. That important development in her abilities took place four and a half years after she began to speak for Seth, and once it opened up Seth Two came through in the next seven twice-weekly sessions. [...] In Chapter 17 she quoted Seth Two from sessions 406–7, and from a couple of others that were held later in the year. [...]

(And what about the very first counterpart references in our sessions? In Chapter 1 of The Seth Material Jane described how we began these sessions [on December 2, 1963] through our use of the Ouija board. During the first three sessions the material came from a Frank Withers — who, it developed in the 4th session, was one of the “personality fragments” making up the Seth entity, or whole self. Just before Seth announced his presence to us in that same session, Frank Withers spelled out a remark through the board that meant little to Jane and me at the time: “One whole entity may need several manifestations, even at simultaneous so-called times.”

(Seth himself first used “counterpart” in the 6th session for December 11, 1963. [...] The newly begun sessions already contained a number of unfamiliar terms and ideas: In the 4th session three days earlier, for instance, Seth had just given us our entity names [Ruburt for Jane, Joseph for me], and touched upon the psychic links connecting the three of us. [...] For that matter, at the time we didn’t know whether or not the sessions would continue. [...]

6. Perhaps I should have briefly discussed it in Volume 1, but ever since Seth originally gave his “Joe, Jane, Jim, and Bob” material (as I call it) in the 683rd session, I’ve wondered about possible connections between the probabilities described in that session and our own reality: How much of our species’ distorted, intuitive knowledge of those probable realities may appear as myth and oddity in our camouflage universe? [...] Considering our personal lack of conscious knowledge about androgyny and such related concepts at the time, Jane and I think it most interesting that Seth came through with that particular material in the 683rd session.

(Now I’d like to present a batch of notes, ideas, and excerpts from sessions about reincarnation, counterparts, and related data, pulling them together into a coherent picture. Although reincarnation and its variations has been discussed by Seth almost from the very beginning of our sessions, the subject didn’t represent one of our own main concerns. [...]

Actually, Seth has been describing in various ways the indissoluble relationship between consciousness and information (or consciousness and anything else), ever since Jane began holding the sessions over a decade ago. [...] From the more than 64 three-ring binders, or volumes, as we call them, that hold the typed transcripts of our sessions, I picked out the second binder. Within it were sessions 16 to 23 inclusive, covering the period from January 15 to February 5, 1964. Five of the eight sessions contained material applicable to this note. Seth, in the 18th session, for example:

10. Besides quoting from the 18th session in Note 7, above, I presented excepts on tree consciousness from the same session in Note 7 for Session 727. Let me briefly continue that early Seth material here: “In drawing up his list of so-called natural laws, I have said (in the 16th session) that man decided that what appeared to be cause and effect to him was, therefore, a natural law of the universe. [...]

4. In Volume 1, see the 687th session at 10:45, when Seth said: “Biologically the man knows he has come from the earth. [...] Then see Note 3 for that session — especially Jane’s poem, Illumination.

6. In Volume 1: See the material from 10:49 to 11:22 for the 684th session. In Volume 2: See the 716th session, for instance.

(She made her remarks after I’d read her Seth’s last session [the 740th for February 2] from my notes earlier this evening, I still don’t have it typed. Incredibly, that session is already six weeks old. [...] Except for the few listed below, then, it may be sufficient to just state that we’ve been in our hill house for a month, and that after much hard physical labor² we’ve settled down enough to resume our natural rhythms of painting, sessions, books, and play. [...]

1. Checking, I soon discovered that Jane had said much the same thing as we sat for the 708th session, following a three-month break in book sessions. [...]

4. Material (and further references) concerning production details for Adventures and Dialogues can be found in the opening notes for sessions 718 and 735. Also see Note 1 for the latter session.

[...] In Chapter 7, see the 530th session at 9:30, when he discoursed upon our frequent projection of “replica images” or “pseudophysical forms” to vividly desired locations. In the 565th session at 9:30, for Chapter 16, he used the example of one’s possible responses to a telephone call to show how all “probable actions are equally valid,” no matter which one of them is physically actualized.

(It happened that in ESP class last night Seth came through with material pertaining to the nine families of consciousness he’d begun discussing a week ago; see the 732nd session. These class excerpts, which I’ve rearranged somewhat for easy reference, may be used when considered with book material still to come, since Seth will occasionally use the class format to supplement his dictation in our “regular” sessions. The quotations also lead us back to the circumstances surrounding Seth’s delivery of his first session on the Sumari.)

[...] See, for example, Session 679 with Note 4; Appendix 1 for that session; the opening notes for Session 696, and so forth.

(I shouldn’t have been surprised last evening to hear Seth say that such an impetus had triggered Jane’s Sumari abilities, for today, when I reread the 598th session for November 24, 1971, I was reminded that he’d said the same thing then. The death of the student’s father had taken place on Thursday, November 11 of that year; Jane’s father, Delmer, died without forewarning on the following Tuesday, November 16; Jane came through with Sumari in class one week later, on November 23; and the next night, in the 598th session, Seth discussed Sumari for the first time.

1. I can note a good deal later that Seth’s material on our making further distinctions in the families of consciousness, beyond the nine he’s already named for us, is certainly related to the passages from a private session that I quoted in the last three paragraphs of Note 8 for the 732nd session: Seth stated that Peter Smith and I “are and are not counterparts” — that with another in this life each of us may often come together, then part, “forming a counterpart relationship when it suits your purposes….”

(Jane held her last session for “Unknown” Reality three weeks ago. She came through with a private session two days later, on December 18, and we’ve been resting from psychic work — including ESP class — since then. [...]

1. For Seth on the fetus — its astral and reincarnational attributes, its energy, its growth, its perceptions from inside the womb — see the quotations from sessions 503–4 in the Appendix for The Seth Material. Those sessions were held in September 1969.

In Appendix 12 and its notes there are a number of passages from Seth (as well as a few of my own) that supplement his remarks, in this 727th session, on present form responding to a future time. See, for instance, the quotations from the 690th session in Volume l; Seth discussed the ability of our species to precognitively alter the present from the future. [...]

3. In the 684th session for Volume 1, Seth came through with one of my favorite statements (even if it is grammatically incorrect): “The cells precognate.” Much of his material in that session applies here: “It is truer to say that heredity operates from the future backward into the past….”

(I read to Jane again the three questions I’d noted down for Seth during break in Monday’s session. As I suspected he might do, Seth began this evening’s session by dealing with the second one. [...]

[...] Now Seth took off into some areas involving Jane that were more personal; at the same time he gave material on the third and then the first of the questions I’d listed during break for the last session. I thought I’d include a few quotations from him on both issues, while eliminating portions of the session that deal with other matters entirely. [...]

2. See the material on Seth’s concept of simultaneous time as given in the concluding notes for Session 724. Included are some very intriguing excerpts from the 14th session, which was held over 11 years ago. [...]

To Seth’s remarks in that early session I’d now like to add what he said a decade later in our time. From the 514th session for Chapter 2 of Seth Speaks: “Consciousness is not dependent upon form, as I have said, and yet it always seeks to create form. [...]

12. Seth’s ideas in this paragraph and the one just preceding it are consistent with his material in a number of sessions for Volume 1. In sessions 681 and 684, for instance, he discussed the on-off fluctuations of our physical universe and everything within it, moment points, probabilities, Jane’s sensations of massiveness, the basic unpredictable motion of any wave or atom, and much more. In sessions 682–83, he stressed the nature of his CU’s, or units of consciousness. Then in Volume 2, Seth likened his own identity to that of a wave formation; see the excerpts from the 775th session in Appendix 18, with Note 35.

5. In the 685th session for Volume 1, Seth stated that the consciousnesses of our cells are eternal, and that biologically we’re equipped to explore many more probable realities than we know. In the 686th session he discussed our cells’ comprehension of the past, present, and future, as well as our cellular responses to a variety of neurological pulses besides that certain range we’re egotistically focused upon. See his first delivery for that session.

7. In all of the sessions, Jane has mentioned the third (or “back”) eye of occult lore only once before — in Session 612 for September 6, 1972 — and she’d been somewhat embarrassed then, too. See the opening excerpts from the 612th session in Appendix 19, with Note 5. In that note I speculated about “what intuitive knowledge she might possess that led her to talk about” the third eye at that time. [...]

There are, of course, close relationships concerning this delivery of Seth’s for the 740th session, the material in this note, and the musical analogies Seth presented in the 735th session, when he discoursed upon the inaudible variations inherent in the compositions played by the young classical guitarist who’d visited us over the weekend of February 2. (I’ve been saving this reference for this particular note.) At 9:45, for instance, in that 735th session: “An infinite number of other ‘alternate’ compositions were also latent within the [first] note, however … They were quite as legitimate as the compositions that were played … and … added silent structure and pacing to the physically actualized music.”

12. And added two weeks or so later: I see connections between the “centuries of inactivity” that Seth describes in this (708th) session, and certain unique psychic abilities of Jane’s — namely, those involving “massiveness” and “long sound.” In Volume 1, see not only Session 681 between 10:22 and 11:47 for data on one of her massive experiences, but that session’s accompanying Appendix 3. Then in this section of Volume 2, see both Note 9 and Appendix 19 for the 712th session, concerning material on Jane’s long-sound trances; during one of these it could theoretically take her a week — or a century — of our time to pronounce just one syllable of one word.

10. This material immediately reminded me that before the session tonight Jane and I had discussed Seth’s promise to answer the two questions I’d posed for him before sessions 698–99, in Volume 1. The question of interest here (I summarized them both in the notes following the 699th session) had to do with my inability to comprehend an “unconscious” species state. [...]

(I haven’t read “Unknown” Reality since I finished typing the last session for it over three months ago; Jane had reviewed all of Seth’s material on the book last week yet still had to remind herself today of the contents of that [707th] session. [...]

(1. The material on Jane, religion, and mysticism in the Introductory Notes, the 679th session and Appendix 1 for that session.

(We keep our typewritten transcripts of the sessions in a series of three-ring binders. I not only record the current session in the latest one, of course, but have in there a page or two of comments and questions so that from time to time I can ask Seth to clear them up. In closing the notebook tonight, I noticed the query I’d written following the 697th session for May 13, 1974, in Volume 1. In that session Seth told us: “Because you are now a conscious species, in your terms, there are racial idealizations that you can accept or deny.”

[...] Her fly experience of last Monday afternoon is mentioned in the opening notes for this session. [...] Seth finished his personal material at 12:10 A.M., and we thought the session was over. Jane was very tired, much more so than she usually is after a session. [...]

9. Nine months ago, in February 1974, Seth mentioned the few tentative contacts I’d evidently made with my deceased mother through dreams; see the 683rd session after 11:30, then see my account of one such dream in Note 5 for that session. Two months later, in the 693rd session, Seth described how I reacted (on a cellular, or “unconscious” level) to communications from my mother as Jane and I considered buying a certain house in my childhood neighborhood in Sayre, Pennsylvania. [...]

(Our last session, the 717th, is deleted from “Unknown” Reality. For it was and wasn’t a Seth session, and it was and wasn’t book dictation, as the following notes will show.

As in Volume 1, notes are presented at session break times as always, but I’ve indicated the points of origin of what would ordinarily be footnotes by using consecutive (superscription) numbers within the text of each session. Then, I’ve grouped the actual notes at the end of the individual sessions for quick consultation. [...] For the most part, then, these approaches keep the body of each session free of interruptions between break designations.

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.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

(Jane’s ESP class for Tuesday evening, February 25, took place the day after the 739th session was held, and was her last one before we began preparing for our move to the hill house. [...] During class I read aloud Seth’s material from the 738th session on the Grunaargh family of consciousness,¹ which Sue had tuned in to during the 598th session for November 24, 1971. [...]

“When I first mentioned the family name, Grunaargh (as Seth spelled it out for us in that session over three years ago), I knew that its members had something to do with printing, or the promulgation of printed material. [...] However, after that session my impression ‘grew’ in such a way that I knew this family had something to do in a more direct way with the printing process — with the fascination of putting ideas down on paper through the use of typefaces that would, as much as the language involved, express the ideas behind the words themselves. [...]

(FOR SESSION 739)

“When Seth listed the families of consciousness last January,³ but didn’t include the Grunaargh, Rob asked him about it in the 738th session. [...]

[...] I think that her experience with inner sound after the session represented her interpretation of the information Seth gave on feeling-tones, some two years ago; see the 613th session for Chapter 1 of Personal Reality. There are certainly deep connections between Jane’s apprehension of her true tone, and Seth’s statement in that session that each of us possesses certain qualities of feeling uniquely our own, “… that are like deep musical chords.” [...] I also think that Jane’s sensing of her true path reflects her understanding of Seth’s subsequent remark at 10:16 [in that 613th session]: “The feeling-tone is the motion and fiber — and timbre — of your energy devoted to your physical experience.¹¹

3. A note added later: Jane used certain portions of the 714th session in Chapter 1 of Politics, while making her own points there. Since it’s obviously part of “Unknown” Reality too, however, the entire session is presented in place in Volume 2. The same reasoning applies to the material each of us contributed at session’s end.

11. Of interest here are a few excerpts from a personal session held just a year later, in October 1975. During the session Seth discussed inner sound in connection with Jane’s own physical symptoms. (In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, see the 679th session before 10:31, and Note 8. The quotations below are also related to the material on inner sound, light, and electromagnetic values in Chapter 5 of Personal Reality.) Seth, at 11:07 P.M.:

(There were clear-cut connections between her creative performance today and her reception of the outline for The Way Toward Health last March; see the notes at 10:45, as well as Note 8, for Session 713; and in Volume 1, see Appendix 7. But there was even more creative expression to come through Jane this evening, not only in the session itself of course, but after it, as I try to explain in the concluding notes.

[...] While discussing probabilities in the 565th session for Chapter 16 of that book he said. [...] In a manner of speaking, your slightest thought gives birth to worlds.”⁸ I also found an opportunity to insert the same lines in Chapter 10 of Personal Reality; see the 641st session.

(11:43 P.M. An aside: Lately I’d delayed typing these sessions from my notes because I’ve been so busy doing the finished pen-and-ink drawings for Jane’s Dialogues. [...] Jane hasn’t had a book session to read since the 718th, for November 6, was held almost four weeks ago. [...]

(During the whole of last month [October] Jane also had to go without reading a block of sessions [708–15] in Section 4; I used the time I’d have spent typing them to complete the diagrams for Adventures. Tonight we decided, then, that from my notes I’d begin reading to her the four sessions following the 718th. [...]

5. In Volume 1, see Seth’s first delivery for the 681st session: “I told you once that there were pulses of activity in which you blinked off and on — this applying even to atomic and subatomic particles.” The full session should be reviewed, especially those parts dealing with the “great inner unpredictability of any molecule, atom, or wave….” [...]

2. In Chapter 2 for Psychic Politics Jane presents not only her library material, but quotations from the 715th session for “Unknown” Reality itself. I wrote this note a month after Session 715 was held in October 1974. [...] We already knew that she would initiate some transposition of material from Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality into Politics, since she was so intimately and enthusiastically involved in producing both works at the same time: I first wrote about such an exchange in Note 3 for Session 714 (when indicating that she’d used portions of that session in Chapter 1 of Politics).

In the 4th session, for December 8, 1963, Seth announced his presence to Jane and me through the Ouija board. In the 6th session he told Jane, in connection with our questions: “Begin training.” In the 12th session, for January 2, 1964, he informed us that we were his “first lesson class,” then added: “At one time or another all of us on my plane give such lessons, but psychic bonds between teacher and pupils are necessary. [...]

5. So far in Volume 2, I’ve mentioned the inner senses (as described by Seth) in Note 5 for Session 709, and Note 6 for Appendix 18. [...] 6, Innate Knowledge of Basic Reality, in the 40th session for April 1, 1964: “This is an extremely rudimentary sense. [...]

6. A note added six months later: When Seth referred to “this book” in the 715th session, he meant a one-volume edition of “Unknown” Reality, of course. Jane and I didn’t decide to publish the work in two volumes until just before the 741st session (for Section 6) was held, in April 1975. [...]

(After supper this evening Jane received from Seth [without subjectively hearing his voice] information that the session would contain material about “probability clusters.” [...] But not until Seth began discussing the subject did I realize that Jane had tuned in to it herself following last Wednesday night’s session. It appears at the end of that [711th] session as item No. [...]

A note added later: Of course, nowhere in the 712th session did Seth come right out and say that in class the night before Jane had tried to express her version of his “own true reality.” Strange it may be, but I didn’t catch this during the session, nor did either of us notice it for some time afterward. And for whatever reasons, with the exception of one rather oblique reference at the end of this (712th) session, Seth himself chose to discuss the whole class adventure from quite a detached viewpoint.

(No session was held Monday night, October 14, as scheduled. [...] In Volume 1, see the notes leading off the 702nd session.

[...] His material is also an extension of much that he gave in the 679th session for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, when he discussed the early background of the probable Jane who chose to live in this physical reality, and how that Jane began to contend with her strongly mystical nature. See especially Note 8 for Session 679, and Appendix 1.)

(Jane commented here on something I’d also become aware of in recent sessions. For whatever reasons since holding the 709th session, she hasn’t had to wait for that certain, more “difficult” kind of trance to develop before launching into Seth’s book material; see the note at 10:55 for that session. [...] For other contrasting examples, in Volume 1 see the notes closing out sessions 688 and 703, as well as related material in Appendix 4, wherein I wrote about the translation challenges she’s often faced since beginning “Unknown” Reality: “— hence her talk before many of these sessions … about attaining that ‘certain clear focus,’ or ‘the one clearest place in consciousness,’ before she began speaking for Seth.”

[...] We were discussing the material Seth had given after 11:38 in the last [712th] session; he’d talked about some of the strains Jane had experienced while serving “the first portion of her apprenticeship” in the development of her psychic abilities. I’ve heard her say the same thing before, of course; see Note 13 for the 712th session. [...] When she began the sessions over 11 years ago, we requested advice and help from a few people,¹ but as we slowly began to understand the very personal nature of her gifts we realized that she’d have to find her own answers as she went along, with whatever help I could learn to offer.

[...] She described it to me — and tonight Seth followed that subject matter very closely in the first part of the session. I suggest the reader review the 711th session in connection with this evening’s data to 11:26.)

(And added a year later: Seth also discussed the will in a personal session that was held just six months after he’d finished dictating “Unknown” Reality in April 1975. As soon as Jane came through with the material, I thought of adding some of its more generalized portions to this session. [...]

1. It will be remembered that Seth first mentioned his concept of counterparts in the ESP class session for Tuesday evening, November 18, 1974, rather than in dictation for “Unknown” Reality; see the opening notes for Session 721. [...] Then see all of Seth’s material on counterparts in the 721st session itself.

4. See Seth’s very acute discussions of the soul (or entity) in sessions 526–28 for Chapter 6 of Seth Speaks. He came through with many excellent points. I’ve always been intrigued by the remark he made just before 10:43 in the 526th session: “You are one manifestation of your own soul.” Then in Chapter 9 of Personal Reality, see the 637th session at 10:20: “A group of cells forms an organ. [...]

(Neither Jane or I could remember what Monday evening’s session is all about — even though I’d read part of it from my “shorthand” notes to the members of ESP class last night. I still have to type the session.)

That material bothered Jane, as I wrote at the end of the session, since “she wasn’t taken with the idea of a group soul, say, or of sharing a soul.” For Seth’s resolution of this little dilemma, see Session 638 in the same chapter.