“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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….”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: