“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.

“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….”

And: “Qualitatively, the [supermarket plaza] was so different than usual that I could hardly believe it. While Rob did the shopping I kept looking — and looking — and looking. I knew that each person I saw had free will, and yet each motion was inevitable and somehow there was no contradiction. I could look at each person and sense his or her ‘model’ and all the variations, and see how the model was here and now in the person. I saw these people as True People in the meaning of a whole people. These people were ‘more here,’ fuller somehow, more complete. People seemed to be classics of themselves.

(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.”

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.

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.

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.”