“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.

1. Yesterday afternoon, Sunday, I lay down for a nap. Just before I drifted into the sleep state I had three little experiences involving internal vision. My eyes were closed. In the episode of interest here, I saw myself back in the first century A.D.: I was an officer of rather high rank in a Roman legion, and I was aboard a small galley in the Mediterranean Sea. I knew that I was on official military business for a land-based armed force, even though I was on ship. I didn’t much like the blunt, unfeeling “I” that I saw. Briefly through those eyes I looked out upon twin rows of galley slaves … I described the scene and my feelings about it to Jane, and made small, full-face and profile pen-and-ink drawings of myself as the officer. I had no name for that other self. Given Seth’s concept of simultaneous time, I thought I might have glimpsed another existence — whether a reincarnational one or a probable one — that I was living now.

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.

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.