“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 9:18 Jane said, “I feel him around.” Then. “I have an idea of what  he’s going to talk about — but I haven’t quite got it yet so I have to wait….” Then: very quietly:)

Now: Dictation: Everything that is apparent three-dimensionally has an inside source, out of which its appearance springs. Some of this, again, is difficult to explain — not because Ruburt does not have the vocabulary, but because serial-word language automatically prepackages ideas into certain patterns, and to escape prepackaging can be a task. We will try our best, however.

The cell as you understand it is but the cell’s three-dimensional face. The idea of tachyons¹ as currently understood is basically legitimate, though highly distorted. Before a cell as such makes its physical appearance there are “disturbances” in the spot in which the cell will later show itself. Those disturbances are the result of a slowing down of prior effects of faster-than-light activity, and represent the emergence into your space-time system of energy that can then be effectively used and formed into the cellular pattern.

Any discussion of the unknown reality must necessarily involve certain usually dismissed hypotheses about the characteristics of consciousness itself. The world as you know it is the result of a complicated set of “codes” (as given at the beginning of the last session), each locked in one to the other, each one in those terms dependent upon the others. Your precise perceived universe in all of its parts, then, results from coded patterns, each one fitting perfectly into the next. Alter one of these and to some extent you step out of that context (underlined). Any event of any kind that does not directly, immaculately intersect with your space-time continuum, does not happen, in your terms, but falls away. It becomes probable in your system but seeks its own “level,” and becomes actualized as it falls into place in another reality whose “coded sequence” fits its own. Period.

(Pause at 10:10.) When consciousness leaves the body, therefore, it alters some of the coordinates. There are various questions involving the nature of perception that then occur, and these will be discussed somewhat later (but see Note 4). Consciousness is equipped to focus its main energy, in your terms at least, generally within the body, or to stray from it for varying amounts of time. Theoretically, your human consciousness can take many different roads while still maintaining its physical base. In far-past historical times, different kinds of orientation were experimented with (as by the “sleepwalkers” described in the last session, for instance). Your own present private experience can give hints and clues about such other cultures, for those abilities reside within the natural framework, now, but are underdeveloped.

(Well over a one-minute pause at 10:30, eyes closed.) Give us a moment … You have not worked with the power of thought or feeling, but only with its physical effects. Therefore, to you only physically materialized events are obvious. You do not accept your dreams as real, for example, but as a rule you consider them fantasies — imaginative happenings. Until very recently you generally believed that all information came to the body through the outer senses, and ignored all evidence to the contrary. It was impossible to imagine civilizations built upon data that were mentally received, consciously accepted, and creatively used.⁷ Under such circumstances scientists could hardly look for precognition in cells.⁸ They did not believe it existed to begin with.

There are two main ways of trying to find out about the nature of reality — an exterior method and an interior one. The methods can be used together, of course, and from your vantage point must be for the greatest efficiency. You are well acquainted with the exterior means, that involve studying the objective universe and collecting facts upon which certain deductions are made. In this book, therefore, we will be stressing interior ways of attaining, not necessarily facts, but knowledge and wisdom. Now, facts may or may not give you wisdom. They can, if they are slavishly followed, even lead you away from true knowledge. Wisdom shows you the insides of facts, so to speak, and the realities from which facts emerge.

Much of the remainder of “Unknown” Reality, then, will deal with an inside look at the nature of reality, and with some exercises that will allow you to see yourself and your world from another perspective. Later I intend to say far more about some civilizations that, in your terms, came before your own (but see the last sentence in Note 4). Before you can understand their orientation, we will have to speak about various alternate kinds of consciousness and out-of-body experience. These will help you to understand how other kinds of cultures could operate in ways so alien to your own.

I have said (as at 9:48) that the body can indeed carry on, performing necessary maintenance activities while the main consciousness is detached from it. To some extent it can even perform simple chores. (Pause.) In sleep, in fact, it is not at all necessary that the main consciousness be alert in the body. Only in certain kinds of civilizations, for that matter, is such a close body-and-main-consciousness relationship necessary. There are other situations, therefore, in which consciousness ordinarily strays much further, returning to the body as a home station and basis of operation, relying upon it for certain kinds of perception only, but not depending upon it for the entire picture of reality. Physical life alone does not necessarily require the kind of identification of self with flesh that is your own.

In greater terms you are just as awake when you are asleep, but the focus of your awareness is turned in other directions. As you know, you can live for years while in a coma, but you could not live for years without ever sleeping. Even in a coma there is mental activity, though it may be impossible to ascertain it from the outside. A certain kind of free conscious behavior is possible when you are not physically oriented as you are in the waking state, and that activity is necessary even for physical survival.

Your own main consciousness has the ability to travel faster than light (as noted at 9:37), but those perceptions are too fast, and the neurologically structured patterns that you accept cannot capture them. For that matter, cellular comprehension and reaction are too fast for you to follow. The poised framework of physical existence requires a particular platform of experience that you accept as valid and real. At that level only is the universe that you know experienced. That platform or focus is the result of the finest cooperation. Your own free consciousness and your body consciousness form an alliance that makes this possible.

3. One of the most unique out-of-body experiences, or projections, I’ve had was much like that which Seth describes here. It took place in April 1971, and I wrote about it in Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks. See the notes for the 583rd session. My consciousness didn’t travel more than 10 feet from my body that time, but the little journey, so vivid and pleasant, did much to reinforce the enlarged view of reality that I’d gradually begun to adopt after Jane started delivering the Seth material late in 1963. I’ve never forgotten the sense of freedom that that modest projection engendered within me — and during it, my temporal relationships were different.

4. A note added some eight months later: Once in a great while Seth refers to the slower rate of physical aging connected with the out-of-body state, and notes the “certain principles” involved, as he does here. Jane and I have always felt that he has some very interesting material on the subject, and that we’ll get it someday. But it didn’t come through before “Unknown” Reality was finished, in April 1975.

10. Perhaps I should have asked Seth to be more specific about those “certain cellular functions” that are accelerated in the sleep state, but I didn’t; I was tiring. It’s well known that parts of the brain are much more active when we sleep than when we’re awake, for instance, but I doubt that Seth was referring to such phenomena here.