“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

To one extent or another, therefore, all of the potentials of the species are now latent within each individual. Often these spring to the surface through events that may seem bizarre. The “unknown” reality is unknown only because you have not looked for its aspects in yourself. You have been taught to pay almost exclusive attention to your exterior behavior. Privately, then, much of your inner life escapes you. You often structure your life according to that exterior pattern of events. These, while important, are the result of your own inner world of activity. That inner world is your only real connection with the exterior events, and the objective details make sense only because of the subjectivity that gave them birth.⁶

You are used to a particular kind of orientation, accustomed to using your consciousness in one particular manner. In order to study the “unknown” reality, however, you must try to see what else your consciousness can do. This really means that you must learn to regain the true feeling of yourself.

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.

(10:55: Jane’s delivery had become somewhat faster and very absorbed as it progressed. Just as they had before our three-month layoff from book work [after Session 707], her trances for “Unknown” Reality were proving to be more “difficult” to initiate than those for the previous Seth books.⁹ She often had to wait for just the right moment to get back into dictation following a break, too; so tonight, after we’d shared an apple, she sat rather impatiently anticipating Seth’s return. Resume, finally, at 11:25.)

To become familiar with the “unknown” reality you must to some extent grant that it exists, then, and be willing to step aside from your usual behavior. All of the methods given are quite natural, inherent in the body structure, and even biologically anticipated. Your consciousness could not leave your body and return to it again unless there were biological mechanisms that allowed for such a performance.

In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, see Note 4 for Session 682.

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.

8. So far in the two volumes of “Unknown” Reality, Seth has discussed the freedom of cells from time, along with a number of their other attributes, in well over a dozen sessions. In Session 684 (in Volume 1) he said at 10:07: “Your body’s condition at any time is not so much the result of its own comprehension of its ‘past history’ as it is of its own comprehension of future probabilities. The cells precognate.”

9. Appendixes 4 and 5, in Volume 1, show the insights Jane herself has gained so far about the more complicated trances she experiences while delivering the sessions for “Unknown” Reality. As noted in Appendix 4, she waits for that “certain clear focus” she needs before taking up the challenges of “translating multidimensional experience into linear terms and thought patterns.” And from Appendix 5: “It’s as though my consciousness is trying to use a new kind of organization — for me, for it — and so there’s a kind of unfamiliarity.”