“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Our curiosity about such speculations led me to plan this appendix shortly after the 711th session was held, and I asked Jane if Seth could eventually offer some insights about the brain’s electrical reality. He finished dictating Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality in April 1975, and we finally got around to the session I wanted six and a half months later.

The nonphysical personality does not think in terms of words, but experiences concepts in a much more direct manner. This sort of thing simply could not be understood by the physically focused individual … The survival personality’s inner self gives this reassembled ego ideas in the same way that, often, the subconscious gives the ego concepts in physical existence. This reassembled ego then attempts to perceive these insights in terms of sense perceptions, which are sent to the physical individual at the other end. Sometimes the communications are made directly, though they must be sifted through the subconscious of the one who is physical. When that person is trained along these lines, however [as Ruburt is], he or she helps in this process, and a psychological framework, like a bridge,²² is erected that serves to connect the two personalities.

(The following excerpt is from an ESP class session that Seth delivered three months after the 711th session [which inspired this appendix] was held on October 9, 1974. As noted much earlier, the chronology for our study of the Jane-Ruburt-Seth relationship “begins long before ‘Unknown’ Reality was started, and continues well beyond the date of its ending in April 1975.” Very soon, then, the quotations to come reach beyond that date: They’re usually short, and are from a mixture of class, regular, and private [or “deleted”] sessions. With an exception or two they contain material that ordinarily might not have been published for several years — if ever. But all of them contribute insights into the subject under consideration.

4. In the 14th session Seth came through with some very valuable remarks about his concepts of time — “It is therefore still a reality of some kind to me,” for instance. Because I’ve always thought those insights well worth repeating, I quoted them in the Introduction for Volume 1 (and, added later, following Session 724 in Volume 2). Now let me further excerpt Seth from that 14th session: “You mentioned earlier, Joseph, that you had the feeling I could refer back to myself almost as if I could turn a later page of a book to an earlier one, and of course this is the case.” With a smile: “Viewing a historical moment through your marvelous television, you can refer to much that has passed, [but] one minute of such a referral costs you one minute of present time. Also you end up short-changed: You give up your precious moment in the present, but you do not have a complete (my emphasis) moment in the past to show for it … When I refer back to myself, I do not expend an identical moment of time in doing so.”

18. As Jane wrote in Chapter 8 of The Seth Material, the Instream tests were very unsatisfactory for us. Since we were never informed as to their results, we were left with no way to judge what proportions of Seth’s impressions could be considered hits, near-misses, or failures. Our nine-month involvement under those conditions revealed both our naïveté at the time and our stubbornness in trying to learn. But learn we did, if not always as we’d expected to; for besides gaining valuable insights into Seth-Jane’s abilities through our own envelope tests, we discovered much through our dealings with at least some kinds of “authority.” Overall, the affair of the tests was most instructive.

Here are a few insights from Seth’s material in the 241st session: “This psychological framework is in itself capable of growth. It represents on Ruburt’s part an expansion, and indeed on my own part also. It is formed partially by abilities inherent within all personalities — psychic abilities — and it is composed of energy. It is not a secondary personality, for it exists in quite a different dimension than do secondary personalities….

By then I’d lost many months from my job as a commercial artist, which was work I’d returned to several years earlier to help ease our financial pressures. I was 44 years old — and, as I recognized after the sessions began, at a point in life where I greatly needed more penetrating insights into the meaning of existence. So did Jane, even though she was almost 10 years younger. As the sessions became part of our joint reality, we gradually came to understand that the illness I struggled with was a disguised expression of rebellion for both of us. We were very dissatisfied with our status quo: After years of work, Jane had managed to publish but a few poems and a few pieces of science fantasy (several short stories and two brief novels), and in my own view I wasn’t making it as the kind of artist I wanted to be. We were driven to know more — about art, about writing, about the human condition, about everything. My own need, as well as Jane’s, struck deep responses within her psyche.