“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(There are four recognized [electrical] brain waves, and in speed they range upward from 0 to 26 and more Hertz units, or cycles per second. [...] Brain waves overlap. Very simply, delta brain waves are connected with dreamless sleep, theta with creativity and dreams, alpha with a relaxed alertness and changing consciousness; beta — the fastest — with concentration, and with an intense focus upon all of the challenges [and anxieties and stresses, many would say] faced in the ordinary daily world.

(We read that in ordinary terms highly creative people [like Jane] usually generate large amounts of theta and low-alpha waves pretty constantly while doing their thing. Measuring and recording brain waves is a complicated task, however; not only is it important which areas or lobes of the brain are monitored — if not all of them — but because of the mechanical limitations of the EEG itself much that goes on in the brain is necessarily missed. [...] Nor at this time, given the minimum premise that Jane’s speaking for Seth constitutes any indication of “paranormal” activity, do we think that her performance could be identified as such per se on the graphs of her brain waves. [...]

I told you that you flashed in and out of the reality that you know.² In between one moment and the next of the waking day, there are, in your terms, long delta and theta waves that you cannot recognize. [...] Each official waking brain wave is a peak in your world of a far deeper “wave” of other experience, and represents your points of continuity.

Each beta wave rides atop the other patterns. In normal sleep, the “conscious” wave rides beneath the others, with the face of consciousness turned inward, so to speak. [...] In sleep the beta waves are not turned off — the “conscious” part of you, with its beta rhythms, is elsewhere.

In sleep your ordinary brain waves as you understand them register a chaotic jungle of experience not normally processed. [...] A mixture of brain waves would result. [...]

(Jane, for instance, hasn’t had her brain waves formally recorded by an EEG, or electroencephalograph. [...]

(Even if beta waves, then, seem to be the “official pulses” of our civilization [to use Seth’s phrase from a session that will be quoted in part below], still Jane and I wonder: When aren’t we actually in a state of altered consciousness? [...]

The beta waves quicken. [...]

Beta was not meant to carry the full weight of conscious activity, however, although its accelerating qualities can lead to initiations into “higher” realms of consciousness, where indeed the brain waves quicken. [...]

[...] The brain waves as they are known are separately registered segments of a greater “whole” kind of consciousness, and your machines are just as segmented, perceiving only those patterns [they were designed to recognize]. [...]

(To go into modern knowledge of the components of the atom can be a very complicated task, so I’ll note only that such particles are regarded as actually being packets of energy, or “probability patterns,” that can also manifest themselves as waves; both the particle and the wave aspects are legitimate in space-time. An atom, then, is composed of a “heavy” positively charged nucleus orbited by “lighter” negatively charged electrons. Generally speaking, these positive and negative qualities could be those Seth referred to in the 464th session.

Then in my note at 10:20 I wrote: “I thought it very interesting that Seth had talked about subatomic waves and particles in the last paragraph of his delivery tonight. Such ideas involve the physicists’ ongoing conception of the duality of nature. For instance: Is light made up of waves or particles? A contemporary accommodation, called complementarity, leads experimenters to accept results that show either aspect to be true.”

“Some of these conditions could be called the result of psychological atmospheres that surround the earth, say. I do not travel physically in a UFO (with amusement), and yet my mental or psychic journeys must occur in a medium of some kind. There are rhythmic activities in that atmosphere that I count upon and use, as for example a sea captain might use the rhythm of the waves for his voyages. Those inner atmospheric ‘waves’ have a certain regularity. They are more intense at certain times than others.”

(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.

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.