“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Actors playing parts are obviously alive, as actors, but in a fictional play, for example, the characters portrayed by the actors are not alive, in your terms, in the same fashion that the actors are. In the psyche, however, and in its greater reality, the characters have their own lives — quite as real as those of the actors.

Think again of the psyche in the manner mentioned, taking it for granted that the program now on the screen is a fully dimensioned reality, and that hidden somehow in its very elements are all of the other programs not showing. These are not lined up in space behind the “front” program, but in a completely different way contained within it. The point of any image at any given time in the picture showing might represent, for example, a top hat on a table. Everyone acting in that scene would view the hat and the table, and react accordingly with their own individual characteristics.

Give us a moment … The hat on the table, while possessing all of the necessary paraphernalia of reality for that scene, might also, however, serve as a different kind of reference point for one of the other programs simultaneously occurring. In that reality, say program two, the entire configuration of hat and table may be meaningless, while still being interpreted in an entirely different way from a quite different perspective. There in program two the table might be a flat natural plain, and the hat an oddly shaped structure upon it — a natural rather than a manufactured one. Objects in your reality have an entirely different aspect in another. Any of the objects shown in the program you are watching, then, may be used as a different kind of reference point in another reality, in which those objects appear as something else.

(9:50.) We are trying to make an analogy here on two levels, so please bear with me. In terms of your psyche, each of your own thoughts and actions exist not only in the manner with which you are familiar with them, but also in many other forms that you do not perceive, colon: forms that may appear as natural events in a different dimension than your own, as dream images, and even as self-propelling energy. No energy is ever lost. The energy within your own thoughts, then, does not dissipate even when you yourself have finished with them. Their energy has reality in other worlds.³

(Slowly:) The simple picture of the universe that you see on our screen, therefore, represents a view from your own now perspective — but each star, planet, galaxy or whatever is made up of other reference points in which, to put it simply, the same patterns have different kinds of reality. True space travel would of course be time-space travel,⁵ in which you learned how to use points in your own universe as “dimensional clues” that would serve as entry points into other worlds. Otherwise you are simply flying like an insect around the outside of the television set, trying to light on the fruit, say, that is shown upon the screen — and wondering, like a poor bemused fly, why you cannot. You use one main focus in your reality. In the outside world this means that you have a “clear picture.” (Humorously:) There is no snow! That physical program is the one you are acting in, alive in, and it is the one shown on the screen. The screen is the part of your psyche upon which you are concentrating. You not only tune in the picture but you also create the props, the entire history of the life and times, hyphen — but in living three-dimensional terms, and “you” are within that picture.

The kind of reality thus created by that portion of your consciousness forms a given kind of experience. It is valid and real. When you want to travel, you do so within the dimensions of the reality thus created. If you drive or fly from one city to another, you do not consider the journey imaginary. You are exploring the dimensions given.

(10:18.) Now: If you alter that picture a little so that the images are somewhat scrambled — and you do this by altering the focus of your consciousness — then the familiar coordination is gone. Objects may appear blurred, ordinary sounds distorted. It seems as if you are on the outskirts of your own reality. In such a state, however, it is easy to see that your usual orientation may be but one of many frames of reference. (Pause.) If you did change the focus of your consciousness still further, you might then “bring in” another picture entirely. On the outside this would give you another reality. (Intently:) In it your “old” reality might still be somewhat perceivable as a ghost image,⁶ if you knew what to look for and remembered your former coordinates. On the inside, however, you would be traveling not around or about, but through one portion of the psyche with its reality, into another portion of the psyche with its reality. That kind of journey would not be any more imaginary than a trip from one city to another.

There are space-time coordinates that operate from your viewpoint — and space travel from the standpoint of your time, made along the axis of your space, will be a relatively sterile procedure. (In parentheses: Some reported instances of UFO’s happened in the past as far as the visitors were concerned, but appeared as images or realities in your present. This involves craft sightings only.* )

Give us time … When you change your ordinary television set from one station to another you may encounter snow or distortion. If something is wrong with the set you may simply tune in patterns that seem meaningless and carry no particular program. You may have sound without a picture, and sometimes even a picture but sound from another program. So when you begin to experiment with states of altered consciousness you often run into the same kind of phenomena, when nothing seems to make sense.

Nothing exists outside the psyche, however, that does not exist within it, and there is no unknown world that does not have its psychological or psychic counterpart. Man learned to fly as he tried to exteriorize inner experience, for in out-of-body states in dreams he had long been familiar with flight. All excursions into outer reality come as the psyche attempts to reproduce in any given “exterior” world the inner freedom of its being.

(Jane commented here on something I’d also become aware of in recent sessions. For whatever reasons since holding the 709th session, she hasn’t had to wait for that certain, more “difficult” kind of trance to develop before launching into Seth’s book material; see the note at 10:55 for that session. In some fashion she can’t describe, Jane is now able to reach the “right” trance state, or to arrive at it, much more easily. For other contrasting examples, in Volume 1 see the notes closing out sessions 688 and 703, as well as related material in Appendix 4, wherein I wrote about the translation challenges she’s often faced since beginning “Unknown” Reality: “— hence her talk before many of these sessions … about attaining that ‘certain clear focus,’ or ‘the one clearest place in consciousness,’ before she began speaking for Seth.”

Your thoughts, for example, and your intents, have their own validity and force. You set them into motion, but then they follow their own laws and realities. All creativity comes from the psyche. I [recently] suggested a project to Ruburt’s class — one that will ultimately illuminate many of the points I am making in “Unknown” Reality. I suggested that Ruburt’s students create a “city”⁹ at another level of reality. This is not to be a pie-in-the sky sort of thing, or some “heaven” hanging suspended above, but a very valid meeting place between worlds. A psychic marketplace, for example, where ideas are exchanged, a place of psychic commerce, a pleasant environment with quite definite coordinates, established as an “orbiting satellite” on the outskirts of your world.

In certain terms, then, this involves in a very small way the creation and colonization of a different kind of reality — consciously accepted, however, from your perspective. On an unconscious level, the world as you know it expands in just such a fashion.¹⁰ Several students have had dreams involving their participation in such a project. Ruburt found himself in an out-of-body state, looking at a jacket. It had four rectangular pockets. It was giant-sized. As he looked at it the front flap was open. In the dream he flew through this flap literally into another dimension, where the point of the flap was a hill upon which he landed. From that second perspective, the pockets of the jacket in the first perspective became the windows of a building that existed in a still-further, third dimension beyond the hill. Standing on the hill, he knew that in Perspective One the windows of the building in Perspective Three were jacket pockets, but he could no longer perceive them as such. Looking out from the hill in Perspective Two, Perspective One was invisibly behind him, and Perspective Three was still “ahead” of him, separated from him by a gulf he did not understand.

When he approached the hill in Perspective Two, he spoke to the contractor who was there before him. Ruburt said that he wanted to change the design. The contractor agreed, and shouted orders to people who were working in Perspective Three, where the building stood.

Now: Ruburt was validly involved in the erection of that building, and he did indeed travel through various dimensions in which the objects in one represented something entirely different in another. He used the particular symbols, however, simply to bring the theory home to him, but it represented the fact that any given object in one dimension has its own reality in another. You cannot move through time and space without altering the focus of your psyche. (Intently:) When you so alter that focus, however, you also change the exterior reality that you then experience.

(11:26. But in our opinions a lot of what Seth had to say was pretty personal — so much so that only certain parts of it are given below, along with a few bracketed changes I’ve made to help tie it together. These excerpts still furnish characteristic insights into aspects of Jane’s personality, as well as my own, and I might add that the deleted portions are even more meaningful to us. We’re making good use of all of this material.)

Ruburt directed his will in certain areas. Your will is your intent. All of the power of your being is mobilized by your will, which makes its deductions according to your beliefs about reality. Each of you use your will in your own way. Each of you have your own way of dealing with challenges. Ruburt used his will to solve [a series of] challenges.

He was determined to find the kind of mate that would best suit him and his own unique characteristics. That intent was in his mind. When that challenge was met he used his will and mobilized all of his power to fulfill his abilities, and to bring about conditions in which he hoped Joseph (as Seth calls me) could also fulfill his. The will, again, operates according to the personality’s beliefs about reality, so its desires are sometimes tempered as those beliefs change. In his own way Ruburt always concentrated upon one challenge at a time — boring in, so to speak, and ignoring anything else that might distract him.

You [Joseph]] were determined to find the kind of relationship you have with Ruburt, the kind of bond your parents never had,¹² and you applied the power of your will in that direction. At the same time you were determined to set yourself apart from the world to some extent, while still maintaining and developing an emotional contact with a mate that would be unlike any in your earlier experience. Creativity would have to be involved. You were also intrigued, determined to travel into the nature of reality, and at least glimpse a vague picture of what it could be. In this probability you provided yourself with a background that included sports and the love of the body, knowing [those qualities] would sustain you.

(And added a year later: Seth also discussed the will in a personal session that was held just six months after he’d finished dictating “Unknown” Reality in April 1975. As soon as Jane came through with the material, I thought of adding some of its more generalized portions to this session. Seth:)

2. A note added six months later: These lines are from a personal session Seth delivered on April 29, 1975, just five days after finishing dictation on “Unknown” Reality (in the 744th session): “Our books, and I am including Ruburt’s, fall into no neat category … In the beginning, particularly, and for that matter now, Ruburt had no accepted credentials. He is not a doctor of anything, for there is no one alive who could give him a degree in his particular line of research, or in yours … He hides behind no credentials, or social system, or dogma….”

Seth continued the session by expressing his concern lest this kind of material lead to feelings of insignificance on our parts. (In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, see Session 681 at 10:00, with Note 2.) However, in a poem she wrote for me a few years later — at Christmastime 1973 — Jane herself dealt equally well with the idea of simultaneous interactions between realities:

11. See Seth on Jane, her will, her relationship with me, and her physical symptoms in Session 679 for Volume 1. I discussed her symptoms in Note 8 for that session also, besides referring the reader to appropriate material in Personal Reality.

13. In Personal Reality, see especially the 657th session in Chapter 15.