“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This afternoon Jane called Tam Mossman, her editor at Prentice-Hall, and told him: “I’ve got my next book.” She’s calling it Psychic Politics. Already she thinks of it as another aspect psychology book, a sequel to Adventures in Consciousness.¹

(Jane, in an obvious state of altered or enhanced consciousness, not only outlined all of Politics today, but wrote four manuscript pages that will either go into its Introduction or Chapter 1. All of the material poured out of her in a most remarkable, unimpeded way — “… as though it was already finished somewhere else, just waiting for me to get it down. But I had to do it just so, right to the last word,” she said, then added enthusiastically, “I think it’s a classic.” Involved with Politics is her perception of another version of herself in a psychic “library,” from which, evidently, she is to acquire a significant portion of her new book.

Throughout the ages people have taken such journeys. The snapshots⁵ are developed in the “darkroom” that exists between your world and those visited. The people who have journeyed into the unknown reality have always been adventurous. Yet many had already seen the snapshots sent to your world by others, and so they began to clothe their own original visions of their journeys in the guise of those other pictures. A group of handy ideas, concepts, and images then formed. The clear vision of such explorers became lost. Those travelers no longer tried to make their own original snapshots of the strange environments and realities through which they passed. It was easier to interpret their experiences through the psychic penny postcards.

So you take a psychic guided tour into other realities; the unknown seems known, so that you are not an explorer after all, but a tourist, taking with you the paraphernalia of your own civilization, and beliefs that are quite conventional.

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.

Ruburt has thus far insisted upon his private vision and his unique expression of the unknown reality as he experiences it, and so he brings back bulletins that do not agree with the conventional psychic line.

(10:18. Jane’s trance had been good, her delivery quiet and rather fast; her voice had become a little rough because of her cold, though. When Seth talked about Jane’s private psychic vision he reminded me of her own remarks on the same subject; see the notes opening the 713th session.

The psychic postcards and travel folders are handy and colorful. They are also highly misleading.

You make your own reality. So, programmed ahead of time, they perceived [data] according to the psychic conventions that had been established. There are tigers in Asia, but you can travel through Asia and if you do not want to you’ll never see a tiger. It’s according to where you go. In the unknown reality your thoughts are instantly made apparent and real, materialized according to your beliefs. There, if you believe in demons, you will see them — without ever realizing that they are part of the environment of your psyche, formed by your beliefs, and thrown out as mirages over a very real environment that you do not perceive. You will believe the psychic tour books and go hunting for demons instead of tigers.

(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.

(So, given Jane’s satisfying yet exhilarating expressions of consciousness throughout the day, I hardly regard it as surprising that she plunged into additional excellent states this evening. Paradoxically, her inspired reception of the material for Psychic Politics came about not only because of her innate knowledge feeling-tones, but because she gave that basic creative phenomenon expression in Politics.

(And she’s quite conscious of the fact that her massive sensations are one of the ways by which, as she has written, she tries to “view our three-dimensional existence and this universe from outside this framework” or to travel beyond the conventionalized psychic postcards.

“I don’t believe in them,” Jane said in answer to my question. “At least not in that fashion — so what am I doing tuning in to a psychic library?” She laughed. “I’m having enough trouble explaining my own ideas. I’ve got to figure it all out.”

8. And “those travelers into unknown worlds” can still be called outcasts, strange, weird — or worse. Jane has had her share of such reactions from others (as have I). When combined with her own natural-enough questions about her psychic abilities, as sometimes happens, such episodes aren’t any fun. In accidental ways that would be quite humorous if they weren’t so personal, we’ve also learned what negative ideas others can have about us: A person will inadvertently reveal to us, during a conversation, or in a letter or over the telephone, the unflattering opinions his or her mate, or parents, or friends, really have of Jane and me and the work we’re engaged in with the Seth material.

Occasionally we’ll meet one or more of our secondhand detractors. Then of course we’re greeted with polite smiles; the conversation may touch upon the weather, but hardly ever upon matters psychic. Sometimes we’ll discover that the “knowledge” of us held by the skeptic(s) in question is so far removed from our actual beliefs and activities that it would take us a very long time to establish any real understanding among all involved — if it would be possible to begin with, that is. We always elect to pass up such “opportunities.”

Yes … And in the face of such skepticism or misunderstanding, Jane and I may at times find ourselves wondering why psychic attributes even exist in nature, in those terms, if they’re denied any application within that framework. “You [each] must have a basic approval of yourself,” Seth told us recently in a personal session. “This is information not only for the two of you, of course, but for others: You must trust your basic being, with its characteristics and abilities. You have them for a reason, in all of their unique combinations. You should also avoid labels, for these can stereotype your perception of yourself.”

“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.”