“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

(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.

(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.] )

“Words aren’t describing this at all. Each person who passes the car is more than three-dimensional, super-real in this time, but part of a ‘model’ of a greater self … and each person’s reality is obviously and clearly more than three-dimensional. I know I’m repeating myself here, but it’s as if before I’ve seen only a part of people or things. The world is so much more solid right now⁴ that by contrast my earlier experience of it is like a shoddy version, made up of disconnected dots or blurred focus….”

(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.”

I said at our last session that the evening was momentous for Ruburt, and that is true for many reasons. This book⁶ deals with the unknown reality, and Ruburt began a different excursion into other dimensions last week.

Ruburt has allowed a portion of his this-life consciousness to go off on a tangent, so to speak, on another path into another system of actuality (i.e., into his psychic library). His life there is as valid as his existence in your world. In the waking state he is able, now, to alter the direction of his focus precisely enough to bring about a condition in which he perceives both realities simultaneously. He is just beginning, so as yet he is only occasionally conscious of that other experience. He is, however, aware of it now in the back of his mind more or less constantly. It does not intrude upon the world that he knows, but enriches it.

The concepts in “Unknown” Reality will help expand the consciousness of each of its readers, and the work itself is presented in such a manner that it automatically pulls your awareness out of its usual grooves, so that it bounces back and forth between the standardized version of the world you accept, and the unofficial⁷ versions that are sensed but generally unknown to you.

Clear understanding or effective exploration of the unknown reality can be achieved only when you are able to leave behind you many “facts” that you have accepted as criteria of experience. “Unknown” Reality is also written in such a way that it will, I hope, bring many of your cherished beliefs about existence into question. Then you will be able to look even at this existence with new eyes.

(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.”

He first saw this library from the inside last Wednesday. He was simultaneously himself here in this living room, watching the image of himself in a library room, and he was the self in the library. Period. Before him he saw a wall of books, and the self in the living room suddenly knew that his purpose here in this reality was to re-create some of those books. He knew that he was working at both levels. The unknown and the known realities merged, clicked in, and were seen as the opposite sides of each other.

He has been working with me for some time, in your terms, yet I do not “control” his subjective reality in any way. I have certainly been a teacher to him.⁹ Yet his progress is always his own challenge and responsibility, and basically what he does with my teaching is up to him. (Humorously:) In parentheses: (Right now I give him an A.)

The development freed Ruburt from many old limitations, and allowed him to at last have practical experience with the unknown reality in intimate terms. Ruburt’s library does exist as surely as this room does. It also exists as unsurely as this room. It is one thing to be theoretically convinced that other worlds exist, and to take a certain comfort and joy from the idea. It is quite another thing to find yourself in such an environment, and to feel the worlds coincide. Reality is above all practical, so when you expand your concepts concerning the nature of reality, you are apt then to find yourselves scandalized, appalled, or simply disoriented. So in this work I am presenting you not only with probabilities as conjecture, but, often, showing you how such probabilities affect your daily lives, and giving examples of the ways in which Ruburt’s and Joseph’s lives have been so touched.

For a while, many of you will play with the concepts while avoiding all direct encounters with any other experience, save that already acceptable. Yet the immensities of your own abilities speak in your dreams, in your private moments, as even inaudibly in the knowledge of your own molecules.

Often you interpret such evidence in terms of the dogmas with which you are already familiar. This makes them more acceptable. Ruburt was often almost indignant when presented with such evidence, but he also refused to cast it in conventionalized guise, and his own curiosity and creative abilities kept him flexible enough so that learning could take place while he maintained normal contact with the world you know.¹²

He has had many experiences in which he glimpsed momentarily the rich otherness within physical reality. He has known heightened perceptions of a unique nature. Never before, however, has he stepped firmly, while awake, into another level of reality, where he allowed himself to sense the continual vivid connection between worlds. He hid his own purpose from himself, as many of you do. At the same time he was pursuing it, of course, as all of you are working toward your own goals.

To admit his purpose, however, to bring it out into the open, would mean for Ruburt a private and public statement of affiliation such as he was not able to make earlier. The goals of each of you differ. Some of you are embarked upon adventures that deal with intimate family contact, deep personal involvement with children, or with other careers that meet “vertically” with physical experience. So journeys into unknown realities may be highly intriguing, and represent important sidelights to your current preoccupations. These interests will be like an avocation to you, adding great understanding and depth to your experience.

(Long pause, eyes closed, at 10:56.) Each person is at his place or her place. You are where you are because your consciousness formed that kind of reality. Your whole physical situation will be geared to it, and your neurological structure will follow the habitual pattern. As you learn to throw aside old concepts you will begin to experience the evidence for other levels of reality, and become aware of other “messages” that you have previously blocked. A certain portion of Ruburt’s training period is over. The entire focus of his personality now accepts the validity of many worlds — and this means in practical terms.

During these years, then, Ruburt’s position within his psyche has gradually shifted until he found a new, for him better, firmer point of basis. From this new framework he can more effectively handle different kinds of stimuli, and form these together to construct an understandable model of other realities. I will continue to speak from my own unique viewpoint, but in your terms Ruburt is one of you, and his explorations, taken from your perspective, can be most valuable.

This afternoon, Monday, I decided upon a nap once again, and once again I was aware of myself as the Roman officer; at least I thought I was that individual. I entered into a sequel to the first vision: I felt myself floating face down in the Mediterranean with my hands tied behind my back. I knew that I’d been deliberately thrown into the sea. I cut off my awareness of the experience right there, possibly to avoid undergoing my own death in that life. From the safety of the cot in my studio, I didn’t panic as that other me faced such a life-threatening situation, yet I was disturbed by it — enough so that I repressed conscious recall of the whole episode until the evening after this (715th) session was held. I’m citing it here so that I can present my “first and second Romans,” as I call them, together.

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.

After my first Roman, I speculated about whether I might have touched upon a reincarnational self or a probable one. See, therefore, Seth’s material on reincarnation in Chapter 4 (among others) of Seth Speaks; then see his material on probable selves in Chapter 16 of that book, and in Session 680 for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality.

For myself, I think of reincarnational selves as having their roots in the physical reality we know (whether in simultaneous or linear terms of time), but of probable selves as having much wider and more complicated ranges of existence: I believe that even though we create them on an individual basis, our probable selves can reach into a multitude of other realities, both physical and nonphysical. I don’t remember Seth discussing such “probable” possibilities in just that way, especially, and they would be much too involved to go into here, but I’ve often felt that some of our probable selves move into realms of being that are literally incomprehensible to us, so different — alien — are they and their environments from our usual conceptions of “solid” physical existence.

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….”

In Chapter 16, see the 567th session for February 17, 1971, at 9:24: “You understand that there are spectrums of light. So there are spectrums of matter. Your system of physical reality is not dense in comparison with some others. The dimensions that you give to physical matter barely begin to hint at the varieties of dimensions possible. Some systems are far heavier or lighter than your own….”

5. So far in Volume 2, I’ve mentioned the inner senses (as described by Seth) in Note 5 for Session 709, and Note 6 for Appendix 18. Seth came through with No. 6, Innate Knowledge of Basic Reality, in the 40th session for April 1, 1964: “This is an extremely rudimentary sense. It is concerned with the entity’s working knowledge of the basic vitality of the universe … Without this sixth sense and its constant use by the inner self, you could not construct the physical camouflage universe. You can compare this sense with instinct, although it is concerned with the innate knowledge of the entire universe.”

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.

7. For contrast, in Volume 1 see the references to “official” reality that are given in Note 2 for Session 695.

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:

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.”