“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Such creative “architect’s plans” are often unknowingly picked up by others, altered or changed, ending up as entirely new productions. Most writers do not examine their sources that closely. The same applies, of course, to any field of endeavor. Many quite modern and sophisticated developments have existed in what you think of now as past civilizations. The plans, as models, were picked up by inventors, scientists, and the like, and altered to their own specific directions, so that they emerged in your world not as copies but as something new. Many so-called archaeological discoveries were made when individuals suddenly tuned in to a world view of another person not of your space or time. Before you have the confidence to leave your own particular home station, however, you must be secure within it. You must know it will “be there” when you get back.

Wait a moment. End of dictation — though I will have something to say about Ruburt’s experience as a fly.

(I’ve never really forgotten that statement of almost six months ago, nor Seth’s saying at the end of the 699th session that he’d go into my questions about it “when your material will fit.”

(“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.”

(12:14.) Now: I have been using your terms as I understood your meaning of them.

(Louder, humorously:) End of explanation.

(Oddly enough, the original pages of the James material that Jane saw mentally during the 717th session [and later presented in Chapter 6 of Psychic Politics] never appeared in Afterdeath Journal. There were two different James books in her “library,” Jane said. She transcribed only one of them.)

6. Since William James died in 1910, this means that in our terms Jane picked up on his world view as it existed some 54 years after his physical death. We could easily ask Seth a dozen questions about the ideas he’s given in just this one paragraph of material. Very lengthy answers could result, leading to more queries. A book on world views could even develop. But the questions always pile up ahead of us; often they’re never voiced, no matter how interesting they may be. Whether Seth will ever deal with this latest batch, implied as they are, is very problematical.

In Volume I, see Session 680, with notes 1–3. My father, Robert Sr., who died in 1971, was very gifted mechanically. According to Seth, a still-living probable self of Robert Butts, Sr., is “a well-known inventor, who never married but used his mechanically creative abilities to the fullest while avoiding emotional commitment.” Although my father’s “sole intent” was the very challenging one of raising a family in this reality, still he may have often exchanged ideas about automobiles, motorcycles, welding torches, cameras, and so forth, with that other inventor-self.

10. I’d like to dwell a bit upon a point I made in the opening notes for this (718th) session, when I wrote about mediums, or others, contacting the well-known dead. I mean it kindly — but Jane and I have never believed that a living individual could be in contact with a famous dead person; especially through the Ouija board or automatic writing. Although we haven’t scoffed at such instances when we heard of them, we’ve certainly regarded those encounters through very skeptical eyes. The gist of our attitudes is that we find it most difficult to believe that “Socrates” — wherever he is and whatever he may be doing, in our terms — is willing to drop everything to give very garbled information to a well-intentioned, really innocent person living in, say, a small town in Virginia. There must be other things he wants to do! Seth’s world-view concept, and Jane’s own experiences with it, make the accounts of such happenings much more understandable.