“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If an inhabitant from another reality outside of your own physical system entirely were to visit it, and if “his” intelligence was roughly of the same degree as your own, he would still have to learn to focus his consciousness in the same way that you do, more or less, in order to perceive your world. He would have to alter his native focus and turn it in a direction that was foreign to him. In this way he could “pick up your station.”¹ There would be distortions, because even though he managed such manipulations he might not have the same kind of native physical structure as your own, of course, through which to receive and interpret those data his altered consciousness perceived.

Your visitor would then be forced to translate that information as best he could through his own native structure, if it were to make any sense to his consciousness in its usual orientation. All realities are the result of certain unique focuses taken by consciousness, therefore. In those terms, there is no outside. The effects of objectivity are caused as the psyche projects its experience into inner dimensions that it has itself created.

New paragraph. While all of your own thoughts and feelings are “somewhere” materialized, only some of them become physical in your terms. They are then accepted as physical reality. They provide the basis for the physical events, objects, and phenomena upon which you all agree. Therefore your world has a stability that you accept, a certain order and predictability³ that works well enough for daily concerns. At that point you are tuned in precisely on your “home station.” You ignore the ghost symbols or voices, the probable actions that also occur, but that are muffled in the clear tones of your accepted reality. When you begin to travel away from that home station, you become more aware of the other frequencies⁴ that are buried within it. You move through other frequencies, but to do this you must alter your own consciousness.*

The probable realities connected with your own system are like the suburbs, say, surrounding a main city. If for simplicity’s sake you think of other realities as different cities, then after you leave your own you would pass through the suburbs, then into the country, then after a time into other suburbs until you reached another metropolis. Here each metropolis would represent a conglomeration of consciousnesses operating within an overall general frequency of clearest focus, a high point of psychic communication and exquisite focus in the given kind of reality. Unless you are tuned in to those particular frequencies, however, you could not pick up that reality. You might instead perceive the equivalent of jumbled sound or meaningless static (as Jane has done), or jigsaw images (as I have done). You might simply realize that some kind of activity was there, but without being able to pinpoint it.

New paragraph. Basically, however, consciousness is freewheeling. Such realities therefore always exist — in your own psyche — outside of your “home station,” and some portion of your own consciousness is always involved in them. Period. There are bleed-throughs, so to speak, in the form of unofficial perceptions that often occur, or “impossible” events that are seemingly beyond explanation. (Pause.) For now think of your own psyche, which is a consciousized identity, as a kind of “supernatural radio.” All of the stations exist at once within the psyche. These do not come through with sound alone, but with all the living paraphernalia of the world. The “you” that you recognize is but one signal on one such station, tuned in to a certain frequency, experiencing that station’s overall reality from your own viewpoint — one that is unique and like no other, and yet contributing to the whole life of the station.

From the point of view of the perceiver these would be unofficial events, and yet they could serve as important clues to the nature of reality. The separate programs existing at once each have their own schedules, and from your reality you could not play them all at once. It seems to you that you are outside of the psyche, so you think of someone as yourself operating this radio from that external position. From your point of view you could not pick up the grocer’s escapades and the symphony, for instance, if both came through at 8 o’clock in the evening, without switching from one to the other: You would have to choose which program you wanted.

Such journeys take you through the nature of the psyche itself, as well as to those other realities that exist as the result of the psyche’s concentration within particular frequencies.

Your experience of yourself marks the seeming boundaries of yourself. In a manner of speaking, I am one personality and one program or station. Ruburt is another. We have learned to be aware of each other* to communicate between stations, to affect each other’s programs and to change each other’s worlds. I do not speak alone to Ruburt and Joseph, for example, but my words go out to the world that you know. Still within your framework, Ruburt tunes in to another station, translates it and broadcasts the information. To do this, however, he has to alter his own consciousness, withdraw momentarily from the official station to bring in this one. That means tuning in to other portions of the psyche, as well as another kind of reality. The final translation of my material has to come through his organism, however, or it would be meaningless to you.

Through him I am aware of the nature and condition of your world, and offer from my viewpoint comments meant to help you. Through Ruburt, then, I am permitted to view the earth “again” in your terms. I exist apart from him, as he exists apart from me, yet we are together a part of the same entity — and that simply carries the idea of the psyche further.

The other [Saturday] evening while he was in bed Ruburt had a somewhat surprising experience. He was not dreaming. His body was asleep but his consciousness was drifting. He clearly heard my voice. It seemed to come literally from out of the sky, down into another room outside of (next-door to, actually) the one in which his body slept. For a moment the power frightened him, for it sounded like a radio turned up to an incredible degree — louder than thunder. At the time words were clearly distinguishable, though later he forgot what they said. For an instant he was tempted to interpret the power as anger, for in your world when someone is shouting they are usually angry. He realized, however, that something else was involved. He did not sense my presence, but only heard the thunder of the voice. It shocked him because he is used to hearing my words from within his head — he had never before been aware of my voice as existing apart from him. In the dream state he has heard me giving him information. In these instances, however, he was the channel through which my voice came. He has often wondered about the nature of my own independence, and the kind of reality in which I exist.

Ruburt acts as a receiver when I speak, and so I must make certain adjustments so that my message can be channeled under conditions that involve, among other things, his nervous system and physical apparatus. That evening, through using what I call interior sound,⁵ I let Ruburt become acquainted with the power at my disposal so that he could realize that it did, basically now, come from beyond his personality as he understands it.

This program spread out and was translated by others in dream states. In physical terms, however, the message given that evening is still to be presented through these books.

The aspects are personified in the character. Through the centuries, in your terms, there have been different personalities, some physical and some not, with whom the species identified. Christ is one of these: in some respects the most ideal detective — in a different context, however — out to save the good and to protect the world from harm. In certain ways man also projected outward the idea of a devil or devils, and for somewhat the same reasons, so that he could identify with what he thought of as the unsavory portions of the psyche as he understood them at any given time. In between there are a multitude of such personalities, all vividly portraying parts of the psyche.

(Jane also came through with material about Atlantis right after the 708th session was held, less than two weeks ago; see Appendix 14. We’d described that episode briefly in ESP class the night before this [711th] session was held — so had our doing so caused her second Atlantis pickup? But it’s also quite interesting to note that on both occasions Jane tuned in to data on Atlantis within hours after Seth had discussed ideas involving alternate realities.)

6. About Seth’s reference to the myths connected with his name: Set, or Seth, was an Egyptian god of evil (with an animal’s head) whose complicated origins could, it’s thought, reach back in antiquity to at least 7500 B.C. In Judaism, of course, Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve, after Cain and Abel (Genesis 4 and 5). (As one correspondent wrote us: “Seth is also a Hebrew name meaning ‘appointed’ — i.e., the appointed one.”) However, some very early priestly genealogies omit Cain and Abel, and consider Seth as the oldest son of Adam; in the second century A.D., for instance, the Sethites, who were members of a little-known Gnostic sect, thought of Seth, the son of Adam, as the Messiah. Seth also shows up in writings of the ancient occult religious philosophy, the cabala, which was originated by certain Jewish rabbis who sought to interpret the scriptures through numerical values; the soul of Seth is seen as infusing Moses; he was to reappear as the Messiah….

Perhaps it’s been remiss on our parts, but Jane and I haven’t concerned ourselves with any connections her Seth may have with ancient Seths. We don’t believe such relationships exist on any kind of personalized basis, although someday we’ll ask Seth to comment here. We think the name of Jane’s Seth came about through much more pragmatic needs. In Chapter 1 of The Seth Material, Jane quoted Seth-to-be from the 4th session for December 8, 1963, as that personality came through on the Ouija board (which we’d used to initiate these sessions): “You may call me whatever you choose. I call myself Seth. It fits the me of me….” Reincarnation had been mentioned by the 2nd session, but since the concept meant little to us we hardly considered the many names that would be involved. Once Seth gave us a name by which to call him, we simply began using it. I’m sure that at the time Jane had no conscious knowledge about Egyptian, Hebrew, or even Christian origins or uses connected with the name, Seth.