SESSION 718

(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.

(Our last session, the 717th, is deleted from “Unknown” Reality. For it was and wasn’t a Seth session, and it was and wasn’t book dictation, as the following notes will show.

(Before what we expected to be our regular session for Monday evening, Jane told me that she’d awakened in the middle of the previous night with insights about two practice elements¹ Seth would discuss — but we didn’t hear from Seth even though she felt him “around” as we prepared for the session.

(Instead a development took place that left us puzzled, intrigued, and more than a little upset. Yet at this writing [immediately following the 718th session], I can note that we’ve been somewhat relieved by subsequent events. Now, in fact, I’m veering toward the idea that Monday night’s session marked a distinct step in the further development of Jane’s abilities. She may also use some of that new material in Politics.²

(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.

(We both wondered right then if Jane was going off in too many directions at once. She’d always refused to try to “reach the dead” in this way before. Both of us were more than a little troubled — but as usual, we were intrigued even as we questioned our own reactions. We were also quite aware of the humorous aspects of the situation, since Jane does speak for at least one of the “dead”: Seth. And of course, as we sat for tonight’s session we wondered if Seth would discuss what had happened Monday night.

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.

Instead of a regular session (last Monday night), the framework of the session was used in a new kind of exercise. It was meant as an example of what can happen under the best of circumstances, when someone leaves a native world view and tunes in to another, quite different from the original.

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.

(“I felt out of the James thing until you read it to me before the session,” she said, “then a lot of aspects about it came back. We won’t bother doing that book of his, I know, but I could get it — the whole thing. It’s right there in the library….” We talked about what an interesting product The Varieties of Religious States would be, and the many implications involved, without intending to do anything more about such a work.

(11:49. Jane rested a minute or so, still in trance. Her fly experience of last Monday afternoon is mentioned in the opening notes for this session. When Seth returned, he delivered half a page of material for Jane and me, including this passage: “He [Ruburt] has made an extraordinary leap into his [psychic] library, and it is freeing him physically. You have made as vital a leap, and it is freeing you artistically. The library is valid, and in the most legitimate of terms it is far more important, for example, than a physical library….” Seth finished his personal material at 12:10 A.M., and we thought the session was over. Jane was very tired, much more so than she usually is after a session. She wanted only to sleep.

(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.”

(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.”

(When Jane first read my question after she’d held the 697th session, she told me that she “didn’t get it” — that perhaps I was drawing inferences from Seth’s material that weren’t intended. I tried to explain the point at issue to her on several different occasions, and discovered each time that it was an oddly elusive one to put into words.

(A note added in December 1977: The 718th session on world views proved to be a cornerstone in Jane’s own development, and in Seth’s thematic structure as well. Jane’s The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation, was published earlier this year, and as I type this final manuscript for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality I can add that she’s also completed The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James. It came out in 1978.

(In a sense, both world-view books were “born” in the 718th session and the odd previous one that took place under Seth’s auspices. I write this although Jane had no idea of producing such works when those two sessions were held [but see my speculations in Note 6]. Nothing has been forthcoming on any additional material concerning Carl Jung, however — nor has Jane tried for this.

(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.)

NOTES: SESSION 718

1. Jane remembered part of one of the two practice elements she’d tuned in to Sunday night; perhaps we’ll get them later. She said that Seth had designed them to follow those he’d given in the 716th session. At the moment, even the fragment she recalled is well worth trying: Seth instructed the reader to immerse himself or herself in an old photograph of a person — and then to look out at our current physical reality through that individual’s eyes. An interesting way to gain a fresh perspective on our present time.

2. A note added several months later: I see now that I should enlarge upon Note 2 for the 715th session, in which I wrote that Jane “would initiate the transposition of material from Volume 2 of ‘Unknown’ Reality into Politics, since she was so intimately and enthusiastically involved in producing both books at the same time.” For her to work this way is entirely in keeping with her spontaneous nature; she intuitively seeks to use whatever sources of information — including Seth himself — she has at hand for whatever project she may be engaged in. In the early chapters of Politics especially, then, she both quotes and paraphrases material from Volume 2, beginning with the 714th session, which contains her account of her original inspiration for that work.

I always indicate in Volume 2 when such a movement of material into Politics has taken place. Yet Jane did no blind copying, and almost always she quoted an excerpt rather than a complete passage from a session, for instance. Jane and Seth each say what they want to say from their unique, respective viewpoints — and it becomes obvious that her book should be read as an adjunct to Seth’s.

In my own notes, of course, I described those events dealt with by Jane and Seth from my own perspective, as I watched them happen. “In ‘Unknown’ Reality the reader should focus upon the material from Seth’s viewpoint,” Jane said. “Yet it might be fun now and then to look at the daily events in our lives first, as recorded in Rob’s notes — and see the dictation in the sessions as emerging from those humble sources. What I’ve said in Psychic Politics should certainly add a lot of insight there.”

4. The contents of this note flow out of what I wrote in Note 2: Seth mentions Jane’s fly experience in this (718th) session, and Jane discussed it in more detail in Chapter 5 of Politics. Then in Chapter 6 of her book she presented long excerpts from the James-Jung material as it developed in the 717th session.

5. See Jane’s “library’ material at the beginning of Chapter 7 of Politics. And again: For her own purposes she quoted in the same chapter the appropriate Seth material from the 718th session.

7. See the 715th session after 10:43.

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.

9. Nine months ago, in February 1974, Seth mentioned the few tentative contacts I’d evidently made with my deceased mother through dreams; see the 683rd session after 11:30, then see my account of one such dream in Note 5 for that session. Two months later, in the 693rd session, Seth described how I reacted (on a cellular, or “unconscious” level) to communications from my mother as Jane and I considered buying a certain house in my childhood neighborhood in Sayre, Pennsylvania. So far, Jane has nothing to report about meetings of any kind with her late mother or father. (All of our parents died between February 1971 and November 1973.)

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.