“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.

(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.

(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.

(Shortly after Jane finished Seven, the entire idea for what she calls “Aspect Psychology” came to her — an “intuitive construct” that she thought was large enough to contain her experience. At one sitting she wrote 20 or so pages of material in which she understood her relationship with Seth, Seth Two, the Sumari, the characters in Seven, and other psychic concepts — all as aspects of a larger self that was independent of space and time. The aspects represented the dynamics of personality. As Jane wrote, she realized that the questions she had been struggling with in Adventures had triggered a new psychology, a new way of approaching the creative portions of human personality.

(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.

You set upon this adventure, the two of you. It is meaningless to say that the books are Ruburt’s. Your ideas of “perfection” and love of detail, or if you prefer, your feeling for the significance of detail that appears exteriorized in your notes, is as present in the inner consistency of the material itself as given by me.

1. Jane discussed Seth Two rather often in Adventures. I do plan to write at least briefly about Seth Two in another appendix for this Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, however, the idea being that such material can be taken as an extension of the Jane-Ruburt-Seth study presented here.

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.