“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Just as I had some small psychic adventures during our time off from “Unknown” Reality, Jane did too. One of hers that I’ll mention here is related to published material. During the night following the arrival of that first copy of Personal Reality, while lying quietly beside me in an altered state of consciousness, Jane received information of how “the ancients paralyzed the air.” It could then be walked upon and manipulated in various other ways. She woke me up to tell me about the experience, and to remind her to write an account of it the next day. She couldn’t identify its source, except to say that she hadn’t been dreaming. At the breakfast table, I told her I thought the material was connected to the sessions in Personal Reality on the interior sound, light, and electromagnetic values “around or from which” the physical image forms. Involved here also, I added, were certain ideas in her novel The Education of Oversoul Seven.²

(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. While we went over it this afternoon I became aware of a familiar, though infrequent, sound: the honking of geese. It was the kind of transient commotion I could listen to indefinitely. The southbound flight was soon out of sight in the rainy sky, and in another few moments it was out of hearing.

(Rapidly:) He is learning how to use the light of his own consciousness, and discovering how far one particular method of using it can be counted upon. He is studying what he can do and not do with that particular focus. He is now discovering that he needs other lights also, in other words — that he has been relying upon only a small portion of an entire inner searchlight that can be used in many directions. Let us look at some of those other directions that are native to man’s consciousness, still waiting to be used effectively.

Each system, of course, brings forth its own culture, “technology,” art, and science. The physical body is basically equipped to maintain itself as a healthy long-living organism far beyond your present understanding, medically speaking. The cellular comprehension⁸ provides all kinds of inner therapeutics that operate quite naturally. There is a physical give-and-take between the body and environment beyond that which you recognize; an inner dynamics here that escapes you, that unites the health of plants, animals, and men. In the most simple and mundane of examples, if you are living in a fairly well-balanced, healthy environment, your houseplants and your animals will also be well. You form your environment and you are a part of it. You react to it, often forgetting that relationship. Ideally, the body has the capacity to keep itself in excellent health — but beyond that, to maintain itself at the highest levels of physical achievement. The exploits of your greatest athletes give you a hint of the body’s true capacity. In your system of beliefs, however, those athletes must train and focus all of their attention in that direction, often at the expense of other portions of their own experience. But their performances show you what the body is capable of.

Some individuals find themselves with memories of other lives, which are other days to the soul. Such persons then become aware of a greater consciousness reaching over those gaps, and realize that earthly experience can contain [among other things] a knowledge of existence in more than one body. Inherently then consciousness, affiliated with the flesh, can indeed carry such comprehensions. The mind of man as you know it shows at least the potential ability for handling a kind of memory with which you are usually not acquainted. This means that even biologically the species is equipped to deal with different sequences of time, while still manipulating within one particular time scheme. This also implies a far greater psychological richness — quite possible, again, within corporal reality — in which many levels of relationships can be handled. Such inner knowledge is inherent in the cells, and in ordinary terms of evolution is quite possible as a “future” development.

The unknown reality: Much of that reality is unknown simply because your beliefs close you off from your own knowledge. The reaches of your own consciousness are not limited. Because you accept the idea of a straight-line movement of time, you cannot see before or after what you think of as your birth or death,* yet your greater consciousness is quite aware of such experience. Ideally it is possible not only to remember “past” lives, but to plan future ones now. In greater terms, all such lives happen at once. Your present neurological structure makes this seem impossible, yet your inner consciousness is not so impeded.

2. In Personal Reality, see sessions 623–25 in Chapter 5. In Oversoul Seven, see the material in Chapter 12, for example, wherein Jane described not only the airborne movement of objects — rocks — but an “extra tension” in the air itself, “as if a million vowels and syllables rose into the air, all glittering, all … alive; like animals of sound….”

4. The sessions in Chapter 5 of Personal Reality, referred to in Note 2, contain information on the functions of the body’s inner sound, light, and electromagnetic values. Session 625 especially mentions those attributes on atomic and molecular levels.

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.