“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In the opening notes for last Wednesday’s session I described how Jane had started her new book, Psychic Politics, that same day while she had been immersed in a state of high creativity; I added that at the same time she’d become aware of a slightly different Jane in a psychic library from which, it seemed, she was to get much of the material for Politics. Jane visited her library several times on Thursday, without actually transcribing anything from it. Then on Friday morning she received another, shorter passage of library material. I quote in part: “There are ever-changing models for physical reality, transforming themselves constantly in line with new equations instantly set up with each new stabilization…. We tune in to these models, and our intersections with them alter them at any given point, causing new dimensions of actuality that then reach out from that new focus.”²

(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.

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.

“I faced a group of shops and saw these also as models and their variations. The same applied to everything I looked at. I thought: ‘I’m being filled to the brim’; and for a moment I wondered if I’d been fitted with a spectacular new pair of glasses. It was an effort to write these notes to begin with. I wanted to just look forever.”

(Jane was still deeply within her great experience during our ride back to the apartment house. “Wow,” she exclaimed, “I wouldn’t touch acid [LSD] for anything after this. Who needs to?” I laughed: “How to go on your own free trip, huh?” She does not use hallucinogenic drugs of any kind.

(Jane’s “adventure in consciousness” was so rich,⁵ even from my observer’s viewpoint, that my attempts to describe it seem terribly inadequate by comparison. In this session Seth discusses to some extent the whole subject of her psychic growth.)

I said at our last session that the evening was momentous for Ruburt, and that is true for many reasons. This book⁶ deals with the unknown reality, and Ruburt began a different excursion into other dimensions last week.

(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.

(Pause at 10:01.) Like many, however, he was brought up to believe that the intellect’s function was mainly to dissect, criticize, and analyze, rather than for instance to creatively unite and build, colon: and analysis was thought of as separating the elements of a concept rather than restricting original concepts. New concepts were thought of as intuitional or psychic, as opposed to the conventional duties of the intellect, so the two seemed separate. Therefore, Ruburt felt duty-bound to question any intuitive construct most vigorously as a matter of principle. This actually provided an excellent transitory working method, for what he thought of as intuitions would instantly come up with a new psychic construct in answer to what he thought of as intellectual scrutiny and skepticism. Period.

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

He has had many experiences in which he glimpsed momentarily the rich otherness within physical reality. He has known heightened perceptions of a unique nature. Never before, however, has he stepped firmly, while awake, into another level of reality, where he allowed himself to sense the continual vivid connection between worlds. He hid his own purpose from himself, as many of you do. At the same time he was pursuing it, of course, as all of you are working toward your own goals.

To admit his purpose, however, to bring it out into the open, would mean for Ruburt a private and public statement of affiliation such as he was not able to make earlier. The goals of each of you differ. Some of you are embarked upon adventures that deal with intimate family contact, deep personal involvement with children, or with other careers that meet “vertically” with physical experience. So journeys into unknown realities may be highly intriguing, and represent important sidelights to your current preoccupations. These interests will be like an avocation to you, adding great understanding and depth to your experience.

Ruburt and Joseph chose to specialize, so to speak, in precisely those excursions or explorations that are secondary to others. The focus of each of their consciousnesses therefore was made up of a certain kind of mixture that made such probabilities, in your terms, possible as prime incentives.

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.

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.

At least to some degree, Jane’s exploration last Friday afternoon of those super-real models for our world represented her use of the sixth inner sense — the same one, she wrote in Chapter 19 of The Seth Material, that “… also shows itself in inspirations, and episodes of spontaneous ‘knowing.’ Surely this sense was partially responsible for my Idea Construction manuscript.” In Volume 1, see Note 7 for Session 679.

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.

“He [Ruburt-Jane] has an ability to identify with others, and communicate. He has always been mentally quick and intellectually agile. As a youngster he received the messages from others so quickly that he was diagnosed as having an overactive thyroid gland. Actually, he was receiving “unofficial” messages that are usually neurologically censored. He could not allow them to become conscious in that world….”