“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….”

This is somewhat of a momentous evening for Ruburt…. As I speak he is experiencing certain sensations, in which his body feels drastically elongated (pause), the head reaching out beyond the stars, the whole form straddling realities.

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.”

The unknown reality and the psyche’s greater existence cannot be separated from the intimate knowledge of the flesh, however, for the life of the flesh takes place within that framework. As earlier mentioned,⁴ the conscious self generally focuses in but one small dimension. Period. That dimension is experienced as fully as possible, its clear brilliance and exquisite focus possible only because you tune in to it and bring it to the forefront of your attention. In your terms, when you understand how to do this, then you can begin to tune in to other “stations” as well.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

(Long pause.) Once individual travelers took those snapshots, and they represented original interpretations of other realities. They stood for individual versions of certain travelers taking brief glimpses of strange worlds, and interpreting their experiences to the best of their abilities. As such they were very valid. (Louder:) They were as valid as any snapshot that you might take of your backyard in the morning. That picture, however, would vary considerably from one taken by an inhabitant of your planet in a different part of the world, and in a different environment.

If there were discrepancies among the snapshots, however, people worried. While you expect pictures of your own reality to be diverse, those who journeyed into the unknown reality became concerned if their snapshots did not agree, so they tried desperately to make all of the pictures look alike. They touched them up, in other words.

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.

Give us a moment … Individually and en masse, you form the world that you know, yet it has an overall individual and mass basis so that some things are agreed upon. You view those things through your own unique vision. You form the reality. It is a valid one. It is experience. It is not therefore unreal, but one of the appearances that reality takes. It has a valid basis — an environment that you all accept, in which certain experiences are possible.

The same applies to other realities. You know there is a difference between, say, the picture before your eyes and a postcard, “artificial,” rendition of it. So there is a difference between the unknown reality and the postcards that have been given to you to depict it.

In your terms, Ruburt has been out for the real thing — to experience the unknown reality directly through his own perceptions, as divorced from the scenes given him by the postcards. Period.

(10:47. “I’m out of it,” Jane said abruptly, coughing. Then: “I’m on to something. Wait a minute. I don’t know if I can get it, or what….” She coughed again and again; her voice had become very hoarse since break so much so that a few minutes ago I’d been on the verge of asking her to end the session. Now, over my protests, she wanted a fresh pack of cigarettes. See Note 3 in connection with the following material.)

“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.

(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.

“So we strike in more realities than one, and I hear those notes together yet separately, perhaps as raindrops, and attempt to put them together and yet hear each separate note….

(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.

(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

3. A note added later: Jane used certain portions of the 714th session in Chapter 1 of Politics, while making her own points there. Since it’s obviously part of “Unknown” Reality too, however, the entire session is presented in place in Volume 2. The same reasoning applies to the material each of us contributed at session’s end.

“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.”

7. Just as legend has it that the continent of Atlantis lay in the Atlantic Ocean between Europe/Africa and the Americas, so the great land of Mu (the Motherland) is said to have existed in the vast Pacific Ocean between the Americas and Asia. Each of those mythical domains eventually sank beneath the waters in a great cataclysm; each perished more than 10,000 years ago. For some Atlantis material and references in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, see Appendix 14.

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.

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.”

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.: