“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.

(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.

“Then, between one moment and the next, the world literally changed for me. I’m viewing it from an entirely different perspective. It’s like the old world but infinitely richer, more ‘now,’ built better, and with much greater depth.

“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….”

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.

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.

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

I have told you many times that your consciousness is not stationary, but ever-moving and creative, so that each of you through your life moves through your psyche. Your physical experience is correspondingly altered.

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.

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.

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 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.”