“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I finally decided that the best way to present the variety of material desired, whether from Seth, Jane, or myself, was in chronological order, letting a composite picture emerge as the work progresses. This system automatically makes room for any references in Volume 1. In actuality the chronology begins long before “Unknown” Reality was started, and continues well beyond the date of its ending, in April 1975. Since the excerpts are still more representative than complete, however, due to the accumulated mass of information available, my own choices enter in: ESP class data are quoted a number of times; included is material summarizing Jane’s own theories about the Seth phenomena, as she worked them out in her recently completed Adventures in Consciousness; but reincarnation, while mentioned often, isn’t stressed in terms of particulars — that is, I refer to Seth’s statements that he, Jane and I led closely involved lives in Denmark in the 1600’s, but those lives aren’t studied per se. Within our ordinary context of linear time I think of reincarnation, even though in Seth’s terms it’s really a simultaneous phenomenon, as being further away, or more removed, from us physical creatures than the more “immediate” psychic connections and mechanics I want to show as linking Seth, Jane, and myself. And also because of that sense of removal, Seth Two¹ is hardly mentioned at all.

(From the 22nd session for February 4, 1964:) I have never trusted the written word half as much as I trust the spoken word, and on your plane it is difficult to trust either. But I do not feel that I could be myself as easily by means of automatic writing, for example. I do not mind speaking through Ruburt’s mouth — somehow the sound of the words is rather pleasant. But seeing myself transformed more or less into plain black and white words on a sheet of paper seems dull and uninteresting. And I have always enjoyed conversation, which is the liveliest of all arts….

Because Ruburt deals in words [as a writer], it is easy for me to communicate in this manner. That is, he automatically translates inner data given by me into coherent, valid, and faithful camouflage⁵ patterns — into words. My information is not actually given as sound. Its transference is instantaneous on Ruburt’s part, and is performed through the workings of the mind, the inner senses,⁶ and the brain.

One reason for the success of our communications is the peculiar abilities in you both and the interaction between them, and the use that you allow me to make of them. Ruburt’s intellect had to be of high quality. His conscious and unconscious mind had to be acquainted with certain ideas to begin with, in order for the complexity of this material to come through.

Information like this is sifted through many layers of subconscious conception, and is subsequently colored. People believing in your organized religions color it in a manner that is highly disadvantageous, and that unfortunately adds to existing superstitions. Ruburt’s mind, believe it or not, is much like my own — though, if you’ll forgive me, in a very limited fashion. Therefore the distortions are much less distortive, much less harmful, and more easily discovered and cleared … Others less perfectionist than myself are content with more distortion. I am not. Ruburt’s Idea Construction⁹ was rather amazing. The inner senses provided him with much, but nevertheless the ideas contained in it represented an achievement of the conscious mind. I was drawn by this to realize that he was ready for me.

I do depend upon Ruburt’s willingness to dissociate.¹² There is no doubt that at times he is unaware of his surroundings during a session. However, this is no more binding upon him than autosuggestion. It is a phenomenon in which he gives consent, and he could, at any time and in a split second, return his conscious attention upon his physical environment.

(From the 54th session for May 18, 1964:) Your Ruburt was, indeed, Seth … I have promised to give you more material dealing with the psychic construction of the entity, and its relationship with its various [physical] personalities. In the beginning, I could not tell you in so many words that Ruburt is myself, because you would have leaped to the conclusion that I was Ruburt’s subconscious mind, and this is not so.

(From the 83rd session for August 31, 1964:) Man sees not even half of the whole entity which is himself. It is true that on this journey [with the sessions] discipline, some caution and understanding, and much courage, is demanded. This is as it should be. I am helping you in this … You are both (meaning Jane and me) peculiarly suited for such a pursuit, with a combination of intuitiveness, basic psychic facility, and yet integrated inner identities … I also want to add that I am not a control, as mediums speak of controls. I am not, as I believe I have mentioned, a secondary or split personality of Ruburt’s. For example, I am not a conglomeration of male tendencies that have collected themselves into a subsidiary personality that struggles for recognition or release. I say that I am an energy personality essence, since that is what I am … My name for him is Ruburt,¹⁵ which happens to be a male name simply because it is the closest translation, in your terms, for the name of the whole self or entity of which he is now a self-conscious part.

Scientists have glimpsed the complications of the human body. They have scarcely glimpsed the complicated realities of the mind.

(Now I’ll refer the reader to Chapter 20 of Jane’s The Seth Material. She called the chapter “Personal Evaluations — Who or What is Seth?” In it she made a number of excellent points concerning her relationship with Seth and Seth Two; for example: “If physical life evolves [in ordinary terms], why not consciousness itself?” The questions we had at the time can be found throughout the chapter. Indeed, we still have many of them — or, I should note, we’re still intrigued by the latest versions of those “old” questions, for like consciousness itself they’re endless in their ramifications. But here I want to call attention mainly to the excerpt in Chapter 20 that Jane presented from the 458th session for January 20, 1969. Seth discussed the psychological bridge Jane and he have created between themselves for purposes of communication; yet most of his material came through in response to my question about his availability to us. “We [Rob and I] both know that some sessions seem more ‘immediate’ than others, and now as Seth continued we saw why,” Jane wrote in Chapter 20. Seth, briefly, from the 458th session:)

It is unfortunate that I must use terms of time to explain all of this to you, but as I told you many sessions ago, my time is not your time (humorously) … Because you ask specific questions at a specific session, it does not necessarily mean that the program has not been prepared, in your terms, earlier. For on many occasions I will see the questions within your mind, or the minds of your witnesses, and [again in your terms] will therefore answer them ahead of time.

The voice mechanism, unfortunately, is something that we must work with, and to get my own personality across through the female image and vocal chords, certain adjustments must be made. Beyond this, however, as I have mentioned before in class, it is not out of the inner sense of my invisible heart, but out of the depths of your own psychologies that you make me into a wise old man, and project upon me the authority images that lurk in your own minds. I have always tried to keep you from making this error, and sought to release from within yourselves your own abilities.

(In July 1971 Jane began a book to be called Adventures in Consciousness, based on the experiences of her students in ESP class. Within a few days Seth mentioned it while dictating Chapter 21 of Seth Speaks: See the 587th session. Class was now providing a wealth of material on reincarnation, various states of consciousness, and out-of-body travel. It was also bombarding Jane with questions for which she found no acceptable answers. Her own intuitive experiences were accelerating, and these, she felt, were more and more outgrowing the ordinary concepts of psychology.

(Jane was particularly bothered by people’s attitudes about Seth, for they often considered him as a “spirit guide” in conventional spiritualistic terms. Though almost eight years had passed since Seth had first come through, she’d known for some time that she wanted to explore the whole phenomenon more deeply. Jane believed Seth when he told us he was an “energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical reality” — she just wanted to know more about what he meant by that statement. She was certain, she wrote, that far more than Seth’s being a spirit guide was involved, that “in larger terms the abilities of living personality are connected with … other facets of creative consciousness.”

(From my notes at the close of the 700th session for May 29, 1974, in Volume 1: “In our case,” Seth said a bit later, “Ruburt almost ‘becomes’ the material he receives from me. If certain other beneficial alterations occur, and further understanding on Ruburt’s part, we may be able to meet at other levels of consciousness — in the dream state, when he is not cooperating in the production of our book material.” For Jane has never met Seth, face to face, you might say, in a dream. The closest she’s come to this situation is in giving a session for him in the dream state, as she does in waking life.

Now, I can be playful because I am not as serious and mystical as the rest of you. I am myself, and if you were yourselves,²⁸ you would not be so self-consciously profound about your beliefs and the nature of your reality. (Humorously, to a certain student:) You would trust your mustache!

(In the opening notes for the 708th session, in this Volume 2, I wrote that Jane finished Adventures in August 1974. She’d started it in July 1971 [as noted a few paragraphs ago], but there was never any straight line of activity for her on the book from beginning to end. She finished Seth Speaks. Then during a class in November 1971, she first gave voice to her trance language, Sumari; so besides the other class material she had several more stages of consciousness — if very dependable ones — to deal with in Adventures. At the same time she worked on her autobiography, From This Rich Bed [which still isn’t done]. At times the creative pace grew even more complicated: From March to July 1972, she put Adventures aside completely to write her novel, The Education of Oversoul Seven, when that idea spontaneously came to her. But overall, Jane discovered that she was frustrated in dealing with class experiments and records for Adventures while she still had so much to learn about her own connections with Seth. More than ever, she needed larger concepts of reality to explain her experiences, those of her students, and of some who wrote.

(The material itself of course, came from another state of consciousness, and this Jane called her “aspects channel.” More on aspects came to her spontaneously at intervals during the next two years. Throughout this period she did a great deal of other work: Besides holding class and continuing Rich Bed, she produced in their entirety Dialogues, Personal Reality, Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, and started Volume 2. Toward the end of this period the aspects channel began opening up regularly, providing further refinements on her original inspirations. And Jane put it all together; the class experiments she’d started out with in 1971, and all of the later material, became Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology. For Part Two of that book I drew 16 diagrams to illustrate her theories.

(As she probed the Jane-Ruburt-Seth relationship in Adventures, Jane found herself developing her own nomenclature, separate from Seth’s, for many of the concepts she and Seth had experienced over the years. “But I didn’t plan it that way,” she said. “That’s just the way it all came out.” She calls the conscious self the “focus personality,” for instance, since it’s focused in this physical [camouflage] reality. The focus personality is composed of aspects of the “source self” [or entity]. Each aspect exists independently, in its own dimension of actuality, but the aspects’ combined attributes form the basic components of the selves that we know. To Jane, Seth is a ‘personagram” — an actual personality formed in the psyche at the intersection point of the focus personality with another aspect.

In certain terms, and in certain terms only, and speaking now as the psychological bridge personality, then what you perceive in me and these abilities represents a portion of Ruburt that is utterly free in those directions — a portion of the human mind, as you understand it, goes beyond the threshold of itself into other dimensions of actuality; then, as best it can, it translates what it learns, sees, and experiences. It goes out of itself — it launches itself on paths that it does not understand, taking journeys that even Ruburt does not understand; and yet, that one portion of Ruburt’s human personality is that free. And so you can see what happens!

My memory does not include a predetermined past in which Ruburt exists. He can do things that did not happen in my memory of that existence, and did not, in fact, occur. Now that is a “mind-blowing” statement, and it applies to each of you. It is important in terms of your own understanding of yourself and the nature of time.

I did not experience it. Ruburt experienced it. I commented on Ruburt’s experience … In his experience, Ruburt is also free enough so that he can open up certain channels of his mind that then comment upon his activity. Some of those channels lead to my reality. But, I am not some spooky Big Brother experiencing his reality for him!

Ruburt keeps track of intuitive details that neither of you are even conscious of, and so there shows an integrity that at least sometimes he is not aware of. You yourselves adopt personalities, though usually you are not aware of doing so. So I adopt a personality that can communicate with your own.³³ In one manner of speaking mine is heroic, larger, and multidimensional. On the other hand, I can operate only mentally in your world. It is Ruburt who must walk down the street.

(From the 775th session for May 10, 1976:) Bits of your consciousnesses,³⁴ Joseph and Ruburt, go out through these books. I am not speaking symbolically. Those portions will mix with the consciousness of others. Portions of your intent and purpose become theirs. My own psychological reality is not particleized. My identity includes the identities of many others, and they each operate in their own fashion. In those terms I am a wave formation. More specifically, however, and to a lesser degree, each physical person operates partially as a particleized being, and partially in terms of a wave.³⁵ But identity, being itself inviolate, is on the other hand everchanging — and there is, in the larger framework of reality, no contradiction.

Now I do not mind being nonscientific, and neither do any of you mind, because if all of your realities were confined to scientific theories you would have no realities at all, and neither would your fine scientists.³⁶ And in my time, I was also quite a dogmatic scientist. The times were different, however, and then I was even more intolerant in my beliefs than your scientists generally — underlined — are today!

6. By the time the 22nd session was held Seth had mentioned the inner senses upon occasion, but had given us a breakdown on just the first one: Inner Vibrational Touch. Consciously, then, we had no way of appreciating what important and interesting parts those “senses leading to an inner reality” were to play in the material over the years. In Chapter 19 of The Seth Material Jane quoted Seth on the nine inner senses he’s described so far.

“The entity itself does not have to keep constant check on its personalities, because in each one there is an inner self-conscious part that knows its origin. I have mentioned before that some part of you knows exactly how much oxygen the lungs breathe, and how much energy it takes to pace a floor, and this is the part of you of which I spoke. It is the self-conscious part that receives all inner data.

“… the part that translates inner data sifts it down through the subconscious, which is a barrier and also a threshold to the present camouflage personality. I have said that the topmost part of the subconscious contains personal memories, that beneath these are racial memories, and so forth. Things are simply not layered in the way I speak of them, but continuing with the necessary analogy, on the other side of (or beneath, to you) the racial memories, you no longer exist within your plane; you look out upon another with the face of this other self-conscious part of you. This part receives inner data, is in contact with the entity to some greater degree than you are in contact with your dreams, and actually directs all of the important functions that you think are either automatically or unconsciously controlled.

“When such abilities as telepathy occur, this telepathic function is carried on continually by this other self-conscious part of you; but as a rule you act upon those data without the knowledge of the conscious self with which you are familiar.

(With a laugh:) “There is of course an apparent contradiction here, but it is only apparent — your dilemma being this: If you have another self-conscious self, then why aren’t you aware of it?

“At the same time — and this is the difficult part to explain — neither of the two faces would ever see the other world. They would not [usually] be aware of each other, and yet each would be fully self-conscious.”

17. For many readers Seth’s remarks about the anima and the animus will require a bit of explaining. Carl Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, postulated that the unconscious of the male contains a female, archetypal (or typical, instinctive) figure called the “anima”; the correlative male form in the unconscious of the female Jung called the “animus.” In Session 119, then, Seth comments on how Jane herself has an animus — the hidden male within — and on how Ruburt, that larger “male” entity of which she is a “self-conscious part,” contains an anima, or hidden female. (See the excerpts in this appendix from the 83rd session.) The contrasts are most interesting. From this information I infer that the entity or whole self of each of us, regardless of our current, individual sexual orientation, contains its own counterbalancing male or female quality, whichever the case may be. Seth hasn’t said so yet — nor have we asked him — but I suspect that an energy gestalt like the entity is much more aware than we can be of its “hidden” opposite-sex form — or forms; for there may be many of them.

“There are a few points of a general nature that I would like to make. Ruburt has been reading Jung, though not consistently. The libido does not originate in the subconscious of the present personality. It begins instead in the energy of the entity and inner self, and is directed by means of the inner senses — outward, so to speak, through the deeper layers of the individual subconscious mind, then through the outer or personal areas.

Two quick reminders: 1. Clairvoyance (“clear-seeing”) is the paranormal perception of events or objects regardless of distance, and without help from another mind. 2. Telepathy is the communication of thoughts or emotions between minds, regardless of distance. In actuality, it’s often difficult to tell whether clairvoyance, telepathy, or both operated in a given instance. Nor am I noting here how the use of these phenomena may be connected to the perception of the past or future.

21. In Volume 1, see Seth’s material on man’s emerging ego consciousness in sessions 686 (after 10:37), 687, 689, and Appendix 6.

“Returning to the material on perception, there are changes in the positive and negative atomic charges, alterations of movement inside the atoms in the smaller particles, a change in pulsation rate. The activity of atoms is actually caused by perceptive qualities. To begin with, atoms do not just move within themselves because they are atoms. The constant motion within them is caused by the unending perceptive nature of any consciousness, however minute in your terms. Does that answer your question?”

The electron is the lightest particle known to have mass and charge, and its internal structure — whatever it may be — is unknown. The atomic nucleus is largely made up of more massive protons and neutrons, but investigation within the nucleus has either uncovered or produced many other subatomic particles as well — over 200 of these, some of them very unstable, are presently known. According to Seth, of course, all of the particles or probability patterns discussed here would be composed of the much, much smaller CU’s, or units of consciousness.

Class Seth material and other events can be found in all of the books by Jane and/or Seth, of course. See, for example, Chapter 13 of The Seth Material, the Appendix of Seth Speaks, and several chapters in Part One of Adventures in Consciousness.

Seth said a lot in that last sentence, of course, but that just means that more questions than usual come to mind. Although Jane and I think his idea for such a book is unique, we haven’t done anything to implement it, nor have we asked him to explain further. Just how would Seth propose to have his “previous personalities speak for themselves….”? Since Seth presumably wouldn’t simply relay such messages, would Jane find herself giving voice for a host of others, male and female, young and old, from many time periods and of the most diverse nationalities? A long project, and one for which she would use her abilities in new ways.

34. Since Jane and I equate the “bits” of consciousness mentioned in this excerpt with Seth’s EE (electromagnetic energy) units and his CU’s (units of consciousness), see the references listed in Note 3 for Appendix 12.

35. Seth’s material in this excerpt reminded me strongly of certain passages of his (and mine) in the 702nd session in Volume 1: “As long as you think in terms of [subatomic] particles, you are basically off the track — or even when you think in terms of waves. The idea of interrelated fields comes closer, of course, yet even here you are simply changing one kind of term for one like it, only slightly different. In all of these cases you are ignoring the reality of consciousness, and its gestalt formation and manifestations. Until you perceive the innate consciousness behind any ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ manifestations, then, you put a definite barrier to your own knowledge.”

Since Seth obviously sees little real difference between the concepts of fields and wave/particles, I’d say that in the 775th session he cast his material in accord with the latter so as to make it as clear as possible to us who are so bound by ideas of space and time: “In those terms …” But overall the physicists discuss energy and Seth talks about consciousness — and therein, as I see it, lies the basic contrast between the two approaches to reality.

Apropos of that “reality of consciousness” quoted above (from the 702nd session), Seth also came through with the following more generalized material in Session 775: “You are actually ‘reincarnated’ many times during one accepted lifetime. There are often great challenges to which you respond. You pick these for your own reasons. In doing so you often change affiliations.

“Consciousness forms patterns of identities. They move faster than the speed of light. They can be in more than one place at one time. (See notes 5 and 6 for Session 702.) They can operate in a freewheeling fashion as identities in themselves, or as ‘psychological particles.’ They can also operate in a wavelike fashion, flowing through other such particles. They can form together into endless, infinite combinations, forming psychological gestalts. Certain portions of these gestalts can then operate as ‘psychological particles’ in time and space, while other portions operate in a wavelike manner outside of time and space. These represent the unconscious elements of the species, which become ‘particleized’ in physical existence.”

37. In Volume 1, see Session 700. Seth at 9:53: “The true art of dreaming is a science long forgotten by your world. Such an art, pursued, trains the mind in a new kind of consciousness — one that is equally at home in either [exterior or interior] existence, well grounded and secure in each.”