“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we sat waiting at 9:32, Jane reported that she was getting her “pyramid” or “cone” effect. At such times she feels that subjective shape come down just over her head — always pointed upward, symbolically perhaps, toward other realities. She also thought she might go into her “massive” feelings at any moment. “But I don’t think any of this has to do with Seth Two,”² she said. She was still exhilarated from her work on Politics. “I’m getting two things: The session’s going to be book dictation, which surprises me, but it’s also going to be on what’s happening to me now…. And I am getting the massive thing….”

Now in a sense the physical body does this always — that is, it sits astride realities, containing within itself dimensions of time and being that cannot be even verbally described. The cells themselves are “eternal,” though they exist in your world only “for a time.”

You know where physical reality is, then, on the dial of your multidimensional television set. While focused within that living scene you can learn to travel through it, leaving the “surface” picture intact and whole. In a way you program yourself, going about your daily duties as conscientiously and effectively as usual — but at the same time you discover an additional portion of your own reality. This does not diminish the physical self. Instead, in fact, it enriches it. You discover that the psyche has many aspects. While fully enjoying the physical aspect you find that there is some part of you left over, so to speak; and that part can travel into other realities. It can also then return, bringing the physically oriented self “snapshots” of its journeys. These snapshots are usually interpreted in terms of your home program. Otherwise, they might make no sense to the physical self.

(Pause at 9:59.) At one time these postcards represented initial original visions and individual interpretations. Later, however, they began to serve as guidebooks consulted ahead of time. For instance: If you plan to travel to a distant country in your own world, you can find such publications to tell you what to expect. When you journey into other realities, or when your consciousness leaves your body, you can also rely upon guidebooks that program your activities ahead of time. Period.

Instead of telling you that you take an airplane from a certain airport at a certain time for a particular earthly destination, leaving one latitude and longitude and arriving at another set; instead of telling you that you leave your country for another ruled by a dictator, or a president, or by anarchy, they will tell you that you leave this astral plane for any one of a number of others, ruled as the case may be by lords or masters, gods and goddesses. Instead of pointing out to you, as in earthly travel booklets, the locations of art galleries and museums, they will direct you to the Akashic Records.⁶ Instead of leading you to the archaeological sites of your world (intently), and its great ruins of previous civilizations, they will tell you how to find Atlantis and Mu⁷ and other times in your past.

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.

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.

“— 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.”

“Seth — or somebody’s saying — maybe it’s just me — relates to the people in our time. I’ve tried to do the same thing, but I suddenly heard my own true tone, which I’m bound to follow … to go beyond the conventionalized postcards … I’m done, Bob.”

(Except for a few instances in which I eliminated repetitive phrases, all of the material Jane gave after 10:47 is unchanged here. At times, because her delivery had become so steady, even precise, I’d wondered if she had entered into a Seth trance, but one without Seth’s usual voice effects. I had also been concerned lest she speak so rapidly that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with her in my notes, but that hadn’t happened. Nor had she spoken for Seth, I realized by the time she finished. Her enhanced state of consciousness had been her “own.”

(Jane told me that her feelings of massiveness had left her by the time she began her own dissertation. I was surprised to suddenly notice that her voice was much clearer now, cold or no. She did feel unsettled. She didn’t quite know what to do. She let our cat, Willy, into the living room from the second apartment we rent across the hall. I suggested she eat something. “It’s strange,” she commented. “I feel that no matter which way I turn, there’s a path laid out for me — and I never felt that way before.” Then she announced that she was going to bed. “But as soon as I get over there [in the other apartment] I’ll turn around and come back here, I’ll bet.” She left. I decided to have a snack myself and to work on these notes while waiting to see if she would return.

(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

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.”

Even as I wrote this note Jane received a letter “Do what I ask for me, if you are not a fraud….” I threw the letter away. At the same time I remembered, as I do every so often, the prophetic and amused remarks Seth made way back in the 20th session for January 29, 1964: “As far as publishing this material is concerned, I have no objections. I didn’t give it to you, and I’m not giving it to you, simply for your [collective] edification. Because of its source you will probably be called crackpots, but I imagine you know this by now.”

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.”