“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

“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.

(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 has been working with me for some time, in your terms, yet I do not “control” his subjective reality in any way. I have certainly been a teacher to him.⁹ Yet his progress is always his own challenge and responsibility, and basically what he does with my teaching is up to him. (Humorously:) In parentheses: (Right now I give him an A.)

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.

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.

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.”