“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(10:09. “I’m getting the feeling of a whole lot of beings or personalities way behind my head,” Jane said as she sat in her Kennedy rocker. Her eyes were open; she was very relaxed; she smoked a cigarette as we waited for Seth to return. Then after a pause: “I’m getting stuff but I don’t know how I’m supposed to give it — through Seth Two, or what. So I’m just waiting….”

(11:17.) “I — I know there’s more there … I want to find out more. I don’t get their [the ‘consciousnesses’ behind tonight’s material] purpose. (Jane looked tired and disheveled now, and I suggested she end the session. She sat with her eyes closed. She had trouble enunciating the next sentence, and had to repeat it:) Dead holes turn into live holes … where the motion and impetus, in your terms, would be toward the future … I can’t get any more…. (Once again I urged her to quit.) I’m almost finished. In this case, the core appears as matter-to-be. I guess I’ll stop. I can’t follow it. This whole thing has to do with those voice effects earlier….”

(The day after this session, Jane greatly enlarged upon her original estimate — three hours — of the time she’d need to interpret the long or slow sounds. Now she felt that “to do proper justice to them would take years — centuries perhaps.” Because of our ordinary time sense the sounds were actually so slow to us that they appeared to be motionless, or “dead,” she told me, leading us to speculate that this may be one of the reasons why in usual terms we call inanimate matter — rocks, for instance — “dead.” But Jane couldn’t really define any sources behind last night’s material, beyond calling them “consciousnesses, or beings — but maybe not personalities as we think of that term.” Then, again increasing her estimate, she said that if “they” tried to communicate with us through sound, through our sensual equipment, “it would take forever.”

1. In Appendix 3 of Adventures Jane listed and described the altered states of consciousness that she’s attained so far in her psychic development. She also considered Seth Two in various other parts of Adventures. In Chapter 2, for instance, the Seth Two quotations are cast in the editorial “we,” the guise in which that energy gestalt often comes through: “We are trying to appreciate the nature of your present existence … For you there may seem to be an unbearable loneliness, because you are so used to relating to the warm victory of the flesh, and [here] there is no physical being … Yet beyond and within that isolation is a point of light that is consciousness. It pulses with the power behind all the emotions that you know … This is the warmth that … is born from the very devotion of our isolation … that creates the reality that you know, without itself experiencing it.”

5. I was surprised to hear Jane’s somewhat embarrassed references to the third eye, since I couldn’t remember her mentioning it before in the sessions. The third eye (sometimes called the “back eye”) is the legendary organ of psychic perception, supposedly located behind the forehead. In occult science it’s been connected with the pineal body, or gland, that mysterious member of the endocrine system is buried deep within the brain, and through the centuries has been considered by many — including the French philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes (1596–1650) — to be the seat of the soul.