“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There are inner conventions, then, as there are outer ones. As the exterior mores try to force you to conform to the generally accepted ideas, so the interior conventions try to force you to make your inner experience conform to preconceived packaging.

There are good reasons for conventions. Generally, they help organize experience. If they are lightly held to and accepted, they can serve well as guidelines. Applied with a heavy hand they become unnecessary dogma, rigidly limiting experience. This applies to inner and outer activity. Conventions are the results of stratified and rigid “spontaneity.” At one time, in your terms, each custom had a meaning. Each represented a spontaneous gesture, an individual reaction. When these become a system of order, however, the original spontaneity is lost, and you project an artificial order that serves to stratify behavior rather than to express it. So there are psychic customs as there are physical ones, religious and psychic dogmas, guided tours of consciousness in which you are told to follow a certain line or a certain program. You become afraid of your private interpretation of whatever reality you find yourself experiencing.

“If I can get this it’ll be something, I’ll tell you,” Jane said, lighting up. She sipped her beer. “Bob — what I’m getting is something like it would be in real fast, quick beautiful sounds that I can’t duplicate — very quick, very musical — connected with the spin of electrons⁹ and cellular composition.

“Wait a minute,” Jane exclaimed again. “What I’m getting is a fantastic sound that’s imprisoned in a crystal, that speaks through light, that’s the essence of personality. I’m getting almost jewel-like colored sounds … I’ll see what I can do with it. I want to get it in verbal stuff — and I’m getting it fast.” Pause.

“— and we’re speaking of personality now,” Jane said, coughing again. “As the seed falls, blown by the wind in any environment, so there’s a seed of personality that rides on the wings of itself and falls into the worlds of many times and places. Falling with a sound that is its own true tone, struck in different chords.”

(10:58.) “Sounds are aware of their own separateness, gloriously unique, yet each one merging into a symphony. Each sound recognizes itself as itself, striking the dimensional medium in which it finds its expression; yet it’s aware of the infinite other multitudinous sounds it makes in other realities — the instruments through which it so grandly plays. Each cell, c-e-l-l, strikes in the same fashion, and so does each self; s-e-l-f, in a kaleidoscope in which each slightest variation has meaning and affects the individual notes made by all.

(Now here’s how I “put this together with the Seth stuff,” meaning that from my viewpoint I’ll briefly discuss the various states of consciousness Jane enjoyed today, as well as her massive sensations and her psychic perceptions of sound in connection with tonight’s session. [The session itself of course, embodied yet another altered state.] At the same time, the reader can make his or her own intuitive connections in assembling such materials, even if “only” in unconscious ways.

(Much of Jane’s day had been made up of a series of altered, and at times even near-ecstatic states of consciousness, each one expressing a unique and creative facet of her essentially mystical nature.¹⁰ Even though not at her best, she’d been able to draw upon lavish amounts of energy. I think that her experience with inner sound after the session represented her interpretation of the information Seth gave on feeling-tones, some two years ago; see the 613th session for Chapter 1 of Personal Reality. There are certainly deep connections between Jane’s apprehension of her true tone, and Seth’s statement in that session that each of us possesses certain qualities of feeling uniquely our own, “… that are like deep musical chords.” He went on to say at 10:06: “These feeling-tones, then, pervade your being They are the form your spirit takes when combined with flesh.” I also think that Jane’s sensing of her true path reflects her understanding of Seth’s subsequent remark at 10:16 [in that 613th session]: “The feeling-tone is the motion and fiber — and timbre — of your energy devoted to your physical experience.¹¹

9. Presented as they are in Appendix 19, both that portion of Session 612 and its notes contain material on the kinds of fast (and slow) sounds that Jane has been able to perceive so far. See especially notes 7 and 10 there; chromoesthesia, or colored hearing, is defined in the latter. Information on electrons, including electron spin, is either given or referred to in notes 8 and 9 for the 612th session.

11. Of interest here are a few excerpts from a personal session held just a year later, in October 1975. During the session Seth discussed inner sound in connection with Jane’s own physical symptoms. (In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, see the 679th session before 10:31, and Note 8. The quotations below are also related to the material on inner sound, light, and electromagnetic values in Chapter 5 of Personal Reality.) Seth, at 11:07 P.M.:

“Give us a moment … The movement of the joints makes sound. The sounds are messages. When hormones are released they make sounds. Those sounds are messages.

“I say ‘sounds’ — yet these inner body sounds can only be compared to an interior body situation where sound operates as light. You are used to thinking in terms of opaque or transparent color. In those terms there is opaque light, and transparent light as well. Sound has light value, and light has sound value. These operate within the body.

“Each frequency, so to speak, functions as a messenger, triggering body response before an actual reaction is apparent … In any body difficulty, the light and sound frequencies become out of tune, you might say. The overall ‘true tone’ is muddied. When Ruburt began Politics he experienced his ‘true tone’ mentally and psychically. Though he did not realize it, this gave him something to go by, so that now … he is unconsciously [still] bringing about the physical equivalent of that true tone.”