“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(On Monday, November 4, I mailed to Jane’s publisher all of the art due for her Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology: the 16 diagrams I’d just finished, plus two older pieces of work. All are in “line,” or pen-and-ink. I thought it interesting that as I was completing work for Jane’s first book on aspect psychology, she was starting Psychic Politics, the second one in the series. But now I can return to my longer project — the 40 line drawings for Jane’s book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time. Adventures and Dialogues are to be published by Prentice-Hall in the spring and fall, respectively, of 1975. Other references to both books can be found in Note 1 for Session 714.

(It seems that a combination of factors led to those oddly disturbing yet challenging events in the 717th session. One is probably just the state of Jane’s recent exceptional psychic receptivity. Another is my own longtime interest in the American psychologist and philosopher, William James [1842–1910]; he wrote the classic The Varieties of Religious Experience.³ A third is a letter received last week from a Jungian psychologist who had been inspired by Seth’s material on the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl Jung [1875–1961], in Chapter 13 of Seth Speaks. And a fourth factor would be a most evocative experience Jane had Monday afternoon, in which she found herself experiencing consciousness as an ordinary housefly⁴: From that minute but enthralling viewpoint she knew “herself” crawling up a giant-sized blade of grass. She was exploring the “world view” of a fly. This adventure was certainly a preparation for developments in the 717th session.

(What had happened to Seth? That individual would have to wait. “I was getting just now,” Jane said at 8:58, “that James called his melancholy ‘a cast of soul.’” Her eyes were closed. “Now I’m getting a book. Why, it’s a paperback. I see this printed material, only it’s very small, almost microscopic, and oddly enough the whole thing is printed on grayish-type paper. I see it really small, in my mind.”

(And with that, in an altered state of consciousness, Jane began delivering last Monday evening the material from the book she mentally saw. Before I fully realized what was happening, I was taking her words down verbatim.

I said (in sessions 711 and 716, for instance) that your normal focus of consciousness can be compared to your home station. So far, exercises have been described that will gently lead you away from concentration upon this home base, even while its structure is strengthened at the same time. You can also call this home station or local program your world view, since from it you perceive your reality. To some extent it represents your personal focus, through which you interpret most of your experience. As I mentioned (in Session 715, for instance), when you begin to move away from that particular organization, strange things may start to happen. You may be filled with wonder, excitement, or perplexity. You may be delighted or appalled, according to whether or not your new perceptions agree or disagree with your established world view.

(Slowly:) He was aware, however, of the universe through William James’s world view. Period. As you might dial a program on a television set, Ruburt tuned in to the view of reality now held in the mind of William James. Because that view necessarily involved emotions, Ruburt felt some sense of emotional contact — but only with the validity of the emotions. Each person has such a world view, whether living or dead in your terms, and that “living picture” exists despite time or space. It can be perceived by others.

Ruburt has been working with alterations of consciousness (for Psychic Politics), and wondering about the basic validity of religion. He has been trying to reconcile intellectual and emotional knowledge. James is far from one of his favorite writers, yet Ruburt’s interests, intent, and desire were close enough so that under certain conditions he could experience the world view held by James. The unknown reality is unknown only because you believe it must be hidden. Once that belief is annihilated, the other quite-as-legitimate views of reality can appear to your consciousness, and worlds just as valid as your own swim into view.

In the same way, if you are overly concerned about the nature of your own reality, and if you are looking to others to justify your existence, you will not be able to abandon your own world view successfully, for you will feel too threatened. Or, traveling in psychic exercises even slightly away from your own home station, you will still try to take your familiar paraphernalia with you, and interpret even entirely new situations of consciousness in the light of your own world view. You will transpose your own set of assumptions, then, into conditions in which they may not really fit at all.

(10:22.) Ruburt picked up on William James’s world view because their interests coincided. A letter from a Jungian psychologist helped serve as a stimulus. The psychologist asked me (deeper and with humor) to comment about Jung. Ruburt felt little correspondence with Jung. In the back of his mind he wondered about James, mainly because he knew that Joseph (Rob) enjoyed one of James’s books.

Quite rightly, he did not interpret the event in conventional terms, and Joseph did not suppose that James himself was communicating in the way usually imagined (but see the opening notes for this session). Joseph did recognize the excellence of the material. James was not aware of the situation. For that matter, James himself is embarked upon other adventures. Ruburt picked up on James’s world view, however, as in your terms at least it “existed” perhaps 10 years ago.⁶ Then, in his mind, James playfully thought of a book that he would write were he “living,” called The Varieties of Religious States — an altered version of a book he wrote in life.

Ruburt tuned in to that unwritten book. It carried the stamp of James’s own emotional state at that “time,” when he was viewing his earthly experience, in your terms, from the standpoint of one who had died, could look back, and see where he thought his ideas were valid and where they were not. At that point in his existence, there were changes. The plan for the book existed, and still does. In Ruburt’s “present,” he was able to see this world view as expressed within James’s immortal mind.

To do this, Ruburt had to be free enough to accept the view of reality as perceived by someone else. To accomplish this, Ruburt allowed one portion of his consciousness to remain securely anchored in its own reality while letting another portion soak up, so to speak, a reality not its own.

(We also discussed the parallels — and differences — revolving around Jane’s perception of the James book this week and her development eight months ago of the outline and chapter headings for the possible book The Way Toward Health. Two months later, in May, she produced the summary for The Wonderworks, which would be a shorter dissertation on her own dreams, Seth, and the dream-formation of the universe as we know it. [See appendixes 7 and 11 in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality.] Jane hasn’t taken the time to concentrate upon either of those projects, interesting as they are, although she would if one — or both — of them “caught fire” for her. Neither Jane nor Seth had delivered their respective world-view ideas when she came through with Health and Wonderworks, so another significant aspect of her abilities has since become conscious. Once more questions arise. For instance: Whose world view was Jane tuning in to for the health book? Her own? In turn, of course, all three potential endeavors — Religious States, Health, and Wonderworks — must have origins that are closely related to the source of information behind the “psychic library” Jane tells of visiting in Politics.

Give us a moment … You are so used to your own private interpretation of reality that when you allow yourselves to stray from it, you immediately want to interpret your new experience in terms that make sense to your familiar orientation. You are also highly involved with symbols. In ordinary life you often hamper your own creativity. When you use the Ouija board or trance procedures, you frequently free philosophical areas of your mind that have been frozen. The resulting information then definitely seems to come from outside of yourself, and because you are literal-minded you try to interpret such experiences in a literal way. The material must come from a philosopher, therefore (amused), and since it certainly seems profound to your usual mundane organization, then it appears that such information must originate with a profound mind certainly not your own.

(We keep our typewritten transcripts of the sessions in a series of three-ring binders. I not only record the current session in the latest one, of course, but have in there a page or two of comments and questions so that from time to time I can ask Seth to clear them up. In closing the notebook tonight, I noticed the query I’d written following the 697th session for May 13, 1974, in Volume 1. In that session Seth told us: “Because you are now a conscious species, in your terms, there are racial idealizations that you can accept or deny.”

(“What,” I wrote at the time, “would a state other than a conscious one be? I have difficulty conceiving of such a situation — which, perhaps, is more revealing of the way I think than of anything else. But how could the species, or its individual members, not be ‘conscious’? Since I think our collective and individual actions are self-consciously designed for survival, in the best meaning of that word, I’m curious to know in what other state these functions could be performed, for existence’s sake…. There are many ramifications here, as I discovered when I started making notes about this concept, so I’m purposely keeping them short.”

There are, in those terms, gradations. When I used the word “conscious” (or “consciousness”), I meant it as I thought you understood it. I thought that you meant: conscious of being conscious, or placing yourself on the one hand outside of a portion of your own consciousness — viewing it (intently) and then saying, “I am conscious of my consciousness.”

Consciousness is always conscious of itself, and of its validity and integrity, and in those terms there is no unconsciousness.

When I use the term time-wise, I refer it to the formation of a structure from which one kind of consciousness then views itself, sees itself as unique, and then tries to form other kinds of conscious structures. A fly is conscious of itself, fulfilled within that reality, and feels no need to form an “extension” of that awareness from which to view its own existence.

In your terms, time considerations involved extensions of that kind of consciousness, in which separations could occur and divisions could be made. In terms of an organic structure, this could be likened to developing another arm or leg, or protrusion or filament — another method of locomotion through another kind of dimension.

The fly is intensely conscious, at every moment engrossed in itself and its environment, precisely tuned to elements of which you are “unconscious.” There are simply different kinds of consciousness, and you cannot basically compare one to the other any more than you can compare, say, a toad to a star to an apple to a thought to a woman to a child to a native to a suburbanite to a spider to a cat. They are varieties of consciousness, each focused upon its own view of reality, each containing experience that others exclude.

(With a laugh: “Thank you very much” 12:19 A.M. And so it turned out that I brought up my questions about self-consciousness, and Seth answered them, when that material did fit.