“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:)

The very slowing-down process itself helps “freeze” the activity into a form. At the death of a cell a reverse process occurs — the death is the escape of that energy from the cell form, its release, the release itself triggering certain stages of acceleration. There is what might be called a residue, or debris energy, “coating” the cell, that stays within this system. None of this can be ascertained from within the system — that is, the initial faster-than-light activity or the deceleration afterward. Such faster-than-light behavior, then, helps form the basis for the physical universe. This characteristic is an attribute of the CU’s, which have already slowed down to some extent when they form EE units.²

(9:48.) Such a traveling consciousness may journey within physical reality, colon: While not relating to that system in the usual manner, it may still be allied with it. From that viewpoint matter itself will seem to appear differently than it does ordinarily. On the other hand, an out-of-body consciousness may also enter other physically attuned realities: those operating “at different frequencies than your own.” The basically independent nature of consciousness allows for such disentanglement.⁵ The body consciousness maintains its own equilibrium, and acts somewhat like a maintenance station.

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

The human body itself has limitless potentials, and great variations that allow for different kinds of orientation. Probable man represents alternate man from your viewpoint, alternate versions of the species. The same applies individually. In out-of-body states many people have encountered probable selves and probable realities. They have also journeyed into the past and the future as you think of them. The private psyche contains within itself the knowledge of its own probabilities, and it contains a mirror in which the experience of the species can at least be glimpsed.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

This does not mean that an alienation results in those realities — simply a relationship in which the body and consciousness relate to other events. Only your beliefs, training, and neurological indoctrination prevent you from recognizing the true nature of your consciousness while you sleep. You close out those data. In that period, however, at an inner order of events, you are highly active and do much of the interior mental work that will later appear as physical experience.

(With many pauses:) Give us a moment … Such a performance actually means that physical reality clicks off and on.¹¹ In your terms, it exists only in your waking hours. The inner work that makes it possible is largely done in the sleep state. The meeting of body consciousness and your main consciousness requires an intense focus, in which the greatest manipulations are necessary. Perceptions must be precise in physical terms. To some extent, however, that exquisite concentration means that certain limitations occur. Cellular comprehension is not tuned into by the normally conscious self, which is equally unaware of its own free-wheeling nature at “higher” levels. So a disengagement process must happen that allows each to regenerate. The consciousness then leaves the body. The body consciousness stays with it.

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

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.

“With disentanglement,” Seth stated in the 43rd session, “the inner self disengages itself from one particular camouflage before it either adopts another set smoothly or dispenses with camouflage entirely. This is accomplished through what you might call a changing of frequencies or vibrations … In some ways, your dream world gives you a closer experience with basic inner reality than does your waking world, where the inner senses are so shielded from your awareness.”

A note: Just as he periodically reminds us of his material-to-come on physical aging and out-of-body states (see Note 4, above), Seth mentions that there are more inner senses he’ll tell us about someday — then adds that many of them are so far removed from reality as we understand it that our comprehension will be intellectual at best; in such cases we won’t be able to identify with them emotionally. And then other groups of inner senses, Seth continues, are truly “beyond verbalization.”

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.”