“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In the opening notes for last Wednesday’s session I described how Jane had started her new book, Psychic Politics, that same day while she had been immersed in a state of high creativity; I added that at the same time she’d become aware of a slightly different Jane in a psychic library from which, it seemed, she was to get much of the material for Politics. Jane visited her library several times on Thursday, without actually transcribing anything from it. Then on Friday morning she received another, shorter passage of library material. I quote in part: “There are ever-changing models for physical reality, transforming themselves constantly in line with new equations instantly set up with each new stabilization…. We tune in to these models, and our intersections with them alter them at any given point, causing new dimensions of actuality that then reach out from that new focus.”²

(Jane didn’t really understand what she’d written. Neither of us realized it at the time, but she was to soon embark upon one of the key episodes³ of her psychic life: “My later experiences that day were a practical lesson in how models work” she wrote after it was all over.

(At noontime that Friday, then, Jane told me that she was going into another altered or enhanced state of consciousness. We were eating lunch. She compared her feelings with those heightened perceptions she’d enjoyed so much yesterday and Wednesday in connection with the birth of Politics. Even though her state of awareness was still growing, Jane decided that she wanted to ride downtown with me after we’d finished eating; I planned to pick up one of our typewriters at a repair shop, then buy some groceries. Already she was so “loose” that she noticed an unsteadiness in her walking. “It’s as though the floor’s rising up beneath my feet, supporting my weight, but in a way that I’m not used to,” she said. She was enchanted.

(As I drove east on Water Street, heading for the center of Elmira, Jane exclaimed again and again over the new beauty she was discovering in her world. A bit later I plan to quote from her own notes some of the details of her transcendent perceptions; but by the time I’d secured the typewriter, then driven over to the supermarket at Langdon Plaza, she didn’t think she could get out of the car. Nor did she want to try doing anything that might interrupt the magnificence of her greatly expanded state of consciousness. For all the while she was having the most profound group of experiences in seeing, feeling, and knowing the ordinary physical world about her.

(We searched the glove compartment of the car for paper and a pencil or pen, so that Jane could make notes about some of her perceptual changes — but to my amazement we could find nothing to use in spite of our efforts to keep writing tools in that very place. Among other papers I finally turned up half a sheet of blank paper, and gave Jane the pen I usually used to cross out items on the grocery list. We were parked in front of a drugstore; I hurried in there to buy pens and a notepad for her. So, while I busied myself in the familiar market next door, she sat in the car writing — looking quite ordinary, a small black-haired woman with her head bent forward…. When I’d finished shopping perhaps 30 minutes later she was still writing. She had covered half a dozen pages.

(Now here are some excerpts from Jane’s notes, as I’ve put them together. [And added later: I remind the reader to see her own much-longer account of the whole experience in Chapter 2 of Politics.] )

(Jane was still deeply within her great experience during our ride back to the apartment house. “Wow,” she exclaimed, “I wouldn’t touch acid [LSD] for anything after this. Who needs to?” I laughed: “How to go on your own free trip, huh?” She does not use hallucinogenic drugs of any kind.

(“What would happen if you opened your eyes and really saw the world?” Jane mused. “It’s indescribable….” And later today she wrote: “Driving home with Rob for example, I felt the earth support the road which supported the tires and the car. I felt this physically, in the same way that we sense, say, temperature; a positive support or pressure that held the road up and almost seemed to push up of its own accord in a long powerful arch, like a giant animal’s back.”

(Jane’s “adventure in consciousness” was so rich,⁵ even from my observer’s viewpoint, that my attempts to describe it seem terribly inadequate by comparison. In this session Seth discusses to some extent the whole subject of her psychic growth.)

(Seth discussed another matter involving Jane; after delivering about a page of material he ended the session at 11:19 P.M.)

1. Yesterday afternoon, Sunday, I lay down for a nap. Just before I drifted into the sleep state I had three little experiences involving internal vision. My eyes were closed. In the episode of interest here, I saw myself back in the first century A.D.: I was an officer of rather high rank in a Roman legion, and I was aboard a small galley in the Mediterranean Sea. I knew that I was on official military business for a land-based armed force, even though I was on ship. I didn’t much like the blunt, unfeeling “I” that I saw. Briefly through those eyes I looked out upon twin rows of galley slaves … I described the scene and my feelings about it to Jane, and made small, full-face and profile pen-and-ink drawings of myself as the officer. I had no name for that other self. Given Seth’s concept of simultaneous time, I thought I might have glimpsed another existence — whether a reincarnational one or a probable one — that I was living now.

No sooner had I described this second adventure to Jane than she surprised me by saying she might use both of the Roman experiences in Politics. She thought she could tie them in with her material on the “ever-changing models for physical reality” that she’d obtained from her psychic library last Friday morning.

2. In Chapter 2 for Psychic Politics Jane presents not only her library material, but quotations from the 715th session for “Unknown” Reality itself. I wrote this note a month after Session 715 was held in October 1974. By late November, in other words, Jane had signed a contract with Prentice-Hall for the publication of Politics in 1976, and had also had time to do considerable work on its early chapters. We already knew that she would initiate some transposition of material from Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality into Politics, since she was so intimately and enthusiastically involved in producing both works at the same time: I first wrote about such an exchange in Note 3 for Session 714 (when indicating that she’d used portions of that session in Chapter 1 of Politics).

But although for Politics Jane drew upon the same transcendent experience I described in the opening notes for the 715th session, she did so in her own subjective way; in “Unknown” Reality I present my version of the event from an observer’s viewpoint. The interested reader might compare the two accounts. I think they’re both well worth having on record, since Jane’s experience was a profound one — and, in my opinion, very revealing for what it tells us about how we ordinarily view our mundane physical reality, and about the much more powerful versions, or “models,” for that reality that exist behind it.

3. In Dialogues, her book of poetry, Jane explored several other “key” episodes in her psychic development; see her Preface, then these selections in Part Two: “The Paper and Trips Through an Inner Garden,” and “Single-Double Worlds, the Rain Creature, and the Light.” She also wrote about those transcendent experiences in Adventures; see Chapter 9 for her “paper” perceptions (in March 1972), and Chapter 15 for her encounters with the rain creature and the light (in February 1973). Both Jane and Seth had things to say about the rain creature and the light in Personal Reality; see the 639th session for Chapter 10.

4. Jane’s declaration of the “super-real” aspects of her ecstatic state, that “The world is so much more solid right now,” soon had me hunting for relevant material I remembered Seth giving, but couldn’t place. I found two sources in Seth Speaks. In Chapter 7, see the 530th session for May 20, 1970, at 10:02: “There are realities that are ‘relatively more valid’ than your own … your physical table [for example] would appear as shadowy in contrast … You would have a sort of “supertable” in those terms. Yours is not a system of reality formed by the most intense concentration of energy … Other portions of yourself, therefore, of which you are not consciously aware, do inhabit what you could call a super-system of reality in which consciousness learns to handle and perceive much stronger concentrations of energy….”

At least to some degree, Jane’s exploration last Friday afternoon of those super-real models for our world represented her use of the sixth inner sense — the same one, she wrote in Chapter 19 of The Seth Material, that “… also shows itself in inspirations, and episodes of spontaneous ‘knowing.’ Surely this sense was partially responsible for my Idea Construction manuscript.” In Volume 1, see Note 7 for Session 679.

6. A note added six months later: When Seth referred to “this book” in the 715th session, he meant a one-volume edition of “Unknown” Reality, of course. Jane and I didn’t decide to publish the work in two volumes until just before the 741st session (for Section 6) was held, in April 1975. See the early Introductory Notes for Volume 2.

8. See the 686th session in Volume 1; then see Jane’s material on other- than-usual neurological messages and speeds in appendixes 4 and 5. And (later) I add here a paragraph from the private session Seth held for us on May 1, 1974 — 10 days after he’d finished his work on “Unknown” Reality:

“He [Ruburt-Jane] has an ability to identify with others, and communicate. He has always been mentally quick and intellectually agile. As a youngster he received the messages from others so quickly that he was diagnosed as having an overactive thyroid gland. Actually, he was receiving “unofficial” messages that are usually neurologically censored. He could not allow them to become conscious in that world….”

In the 4th session, for December 8, 1963, Seth announced his presence to Jane and me through the Ouija board. In the 6th session he told Jane, in connection with our questions: “Begin training.” In the 12th session, for January 2, 1964, he informed us that we were his “first lesson class,” then added: “At one time or another all of us on my plane give such lessons, but psychic bonds between teacher and pupils are necessary. This means that we must wait until personalities in your reality have progressed sufficiently for lessons to begin … although reason is extremely important, and I do not mean to minimize its value, nevertheless what you call emotion or feeling is the connective between us, and it is the connective that most clearly represents the life force on any plane and under any circumstances.”

Later, we were to learn about the distortions that could happen as Jane relayed some of Seth’s material; given the open-ended nature of time, and considering the idea of probable realities, we came to realize that simultaneously we could and could not be Seth’s “first lesson class.” But in those early sessions we had no background knowledge out of which to ask meaningful questions. In the 15th session Seth told Jane and me: “I am giving you what may be considered a broad outline to be filled in.”

12. Note 25 for Appendix 18 contains information on The Coming of Seth, in which Jane described her burgeoning psychic abilities.