“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(See Note 1 for descriptions of the [two] unusual mental events I experienced Sunday and today: I may have seen myself as a Roman military officer in the first century A.D.

Ruburt is taking this new step from your perspective, and from that standpoint he is doing two things.

(At a slower pace:) He is consciously entering into another room of the psyche, and also entering into the reality that corresponds to it. This brings the two experiences together so that they coincide. They are held, however, both separately and in joint focus. As a rule you use one particular level of awareness, and this correlates all of your conscious activities. I told you that the physical body itself was able to pick up other neurological messages beside those to which you usually react.⁸ Now let me add that when a certain proficiency is reached in alterations of consciousness, this allows you to become practically familiar with some of these other neurological messages. In such a way Ruburt is able to physically perceive what he is doing in his “library.”

(Pause at 10:01.) Like many, however, he was brought up to believe that the intellect’s function was mainly to dissect, criticize, and analyze, rather than for instance to creatively unite and build, colon: and analysis was thought of as separating the elements of a concept rather than restricting original concepts. New concepts were thought of as intuitional or psychic, as opposed to the conventional duties of the intellect, so the two seemed separate. Therefore, Ruburt felt duty-bound to question any intuitive construct most vigorously as a matter of principle. This actually provided an excellent transitory working method, for what he thought of as intuitions would instantly come up with a new psychic construct in answer to what he thought of as intellectual scrutiny and skepticism. Period.

Actually, the intellect and intuitions go hand in hand. In Ruburt’s experience,¹⁰ the two finally began to work together as they should. What I call the high intellect then took over, a superb blend of intuitional and intellectual abilities working together so that they almost seem to form a new faculty (intently).

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….”

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.