“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

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.

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.