“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Jamaica” took place on a Saturday, and Seth referred to it briefly in the next session, on Monday night. That session turned out to be private, rather than one for book dictation. Seth came back to Jamaica in Jane’s ESP class the next evening [on November 19]; at the same time he began discussing his concept of “counterparts,” which he formally introduces in tonight’s [721st] session for “Unknown” Reality. His material enhances my Roman and Jamaican visions [and others] — which saves me considerable effort in figuring them out for myself, of course. And, obviously, Seth does a much better job of putting them all together than I could.

(I’d like to add that I hardly think it a coincidence, however, that within less than a month from my “first Roman,” Seth was to initiate a body of information in which he began to clarify many of the questions I had about certain of my own psychic adventures. I don’t think those events directly led Seth into beginning his new material, but in retrospect Jane and I agree that they certainly played some considerable part in establishing a foundation, or impetus, for such a development.

(Last Wednesday night’s scheduled session wasn’t held, giving Jane some rest the day after class. Then yesterday, Sunday, she gave a very long session on her own for a visiting scientist. When I write “on her own,” I not only mean that Seth didn’t come through, but that Jane wasn’t aware of his presence even though she didn’t give voice to it.

(She enjoyed the exchange a great deal, she made sketches while speaking on such subjects as the many facets of the electron and its behavior; time and its variations; gravity, its changes with motion, and its attributes in the past, present, and future; the velocities of light; mathematical equations; astronomy, including perceptions by telescope of the future as well as of the past; the structure of the earth’s core; earthquakes and “black” sound/light; language, including glossolalia and her own Sumari; pyramids, coordination points, and so forth. Our guest recorded it all and is to send us a transcript [which he did]. Jane plans to quote parts of it in Psychic Politics.² These bits are from her material about gravity and age: “There is a different kind of gravity that surrounds older objects than that which surrounds younger ones, but we don’t perceive this at the level of our instruments. We can pick it up, however, if we know where to look. Age affects gravity … Older objects are heavier. This is ordinary gravity — not some new kind.”

(I’ll finish the references to yesterday’s session by quoting the comments Seth made at the end of some material we’ve deleted from the 712th session in Section 4. A few weeks ago, through a magazine we subscribe to, Jane joined a science club. Now each month she receives a little kit to be assembled; this in turn is used to carry out the scientific experiment for the month. Seth: “Ruburt’s science kit is something picked up, in your terms, from another probability — in which he learned all there is to know about science as you know it. That is why he can enter into the reality of electrons so easily.”³

(And separately: Over the weekend Jane remarked more than once that “Unknown” Reality might prove to be so long that it could go into two volumes — a probable development I hardly took seriously. [Her statements turned out to be exactly prophetic, of course, as I noted five months later in the 741st session. Also see the beginning of the Introductory Notes for Volume 1.])

Now: Dictation: When you look into a mirror you see your reflection, but it does not talk back to you. In the dream state you are looking into the mirror of the psyche, so to speak, and seeing the reflections of your own thoughts, fears, and desires.

Here, however, the “reflections” do indeed speak, and take their own form. In a certain sense they are freewheeling, in that they have their own kind of reality. In the dream state your joys and fears talk back to you, perform, and act out the role in which you have cast them.

If, for example, you believe that you are possessed of great inner wealth, you may have a dream about a king in a fine palace. The king actually need not look like you at all, nor need you identify with him in the dream. Symbolically, however, this would represent one way of expressing your feelings. Inner wealth would be interpreted here in the same terms as worldly luxury. The dream, once created, would go its own way. If you have conflicts over the ideas connected with good and evil, or wealth and poverty, then the king might lose his lands or goods, or some catastrophe might befall him.

The reflections of your ideas and intimate emotions are then projected outward in a rich drama. You can observe the play, take a role in it, or move in and out of its acts as you prefer. You will use your own private symbols. These represent your psychic shorthand. They are connected with your personal creativity, so dream books will not help you in deciphering those meanings if they attach a specific significance to any given symbol. Symbols themselves change. If you had before you your entire dream history and could read — as in a book — the story of all of your dreams from birth, you would discover that you changed the meaning of your symbols as you went along, or as it suited your purposes. The content of a dream itself has much to do with the way you employ any given symbol.

Give us a moment … Whether or not you remember your dreams, you are educating yourself as they happen. You may suddenly “awaken” while still within the dream state, however, and recognize the drama that you have yourself created. At this point you will understand the fact that the play, while seeming quite real, is to a certain extent hallucinatory. If you prefer, you can clear the stage at once by saying, “I do not like this play, and so I will create it no longer.” You may then find yourself facing an empty stage, become momentarily disoriented at the sudden lack of activity, and promptly begin to form another dream play more to your liking.

If, however, you pause first and wait a moment, you can begin to glimpse the environment that serves as a stage: the natural landscape of the dream reality. In waking life, if you want to disconnect yourself from an event or place, you try to move away from it in space. In dream reality events occur in a different fashion, and places spring up about you. If you meet with people or events not of your liking, then you must simply move your attention away from them, and they will disappear as far as your experience is concerned. In physical reality you can move fairly freely through space, but you do not travel from one city to another, for example, unless you want to. Intent is invoked. This is so obvious that its significance escapes you: but it is intent that moves you through space, and that is behind all of your physical locomotion. You utilize ships, automobiles, trains, airplanes, because you want to go to another place, and certain vehicles work best under certain conditions.

(9:53.) In the waking state you travel to places. They do not come to you. In dream reality, however, your intent causes places to spring up about you. They come to you, instead of the other way around. You form and attract “places,” or a kind of inner space in which you then have certain experiences.

In a dream, attempt to expand whatever space you find yourself in. If you are in a room, move from it into another one. If you are on a street, follow it as far as you can, or turn a corner. Unless you are working out ideas of limitations for your own reasons, you will find that you can indeed expand inner space. There is no point where an end to it need appear.

Now: What you think of as exterior space expands in precisely the same manner. In this respect, dream reality faithfully mirrors what you refer to as the nature of the exterior world.

Earth experience, even in your terms, is far more varied than you ever consciously imagine. The intimate life of a person in one country, with its culture, is far different from that of an individual who comes from another kind of culture, with its own ideas of art, history, politics or religion or law. Because you focus upon similarities of necessity, then the physical world possesses its coherence.⁵

There are jet travelers and those who have never seen a train, so your own system of reality contains vast contrasts. The dream state, however, involves you with a kind of communication that is not physically practical, for there (intently) no man or woman is caught without a given role; no individual’s ideas in the dream state are limited by his or her cultural background, or physical experience.

Even those who have never seen an airplane can travel from place to place in the twinkling of an eye, and the poor are fed, the ignorant are wise, the sick are well. The creativity that may be physically hampered is expressed. It is true that the hungry man, awakening, is still hungry. The ill may awaken no healthier than they were before. In deeper terms, however, in the dream state each person will be working out his or her own problems or challenges. Dreaming, a person can cure himself or herself of a disease, working through the problems that caused it. Dreaming, the hungry individual can discover ways to find food, or to procure the money to buy it. Dreaming is a practical activity. If it were understood as such, it would be even more practical in your terms.

Animals also dream, for example, and whole herds of starving animals will be led by their dreams to find better feeding grounds. In the same way, the dreams of starving people point toward the solution of the problem. Such data are largely ignored, however. (With emphasis:) In the dream state any individual can find the solution to whatever challenge exists.

Give us a moment … Your dream experience represents a pivotal reality, like the center of a wheel. Your physical world is one spoke. You are united with all of your other simultaneous existences through the nature of the dream state. The unknown reality is there presented to your view, and there is no biological, mental, or psychic reason why you cannot learn to use and understand your own dreaming reality.

In your dreams, in your terms, you find your personal past appearing in the present, so in those terms the past of the species also occurs. (Long pause.) Future probabilities are worked out there also so that individually and en masse the species decides upon its probable future. There is a feeling, held by many, that a study of dream reality will lead you further away from the world you know. Instead, it would connect you with that world in most practical terms.

The following material may be used here in our book, or in your own book.⁶ There will be no gap in this book if you do not use it here.⁷

The fact is that the basic nature of reality shows itself in the nature of the dream state quite clearly, where in any given night you may find yourself undertaking many roles simultaneously. You may change sex, social position, national or religious alliance, age, and yet know yourself as yourself.

In all of these episodes definite emotional experience was involved. Also connected was an indefinable but unmistakable sense of familiarity. Space and time continually expand, and all probabilities of any given action are actualized in one reality or another. All of the potentials of the entity are also actualized.

(11:11.) Give us a moment … Quite literally, you live more than one life at a time. You do not experience your century simply from one separate vantage point, and the individuals alive in any given century have far deeper connections than you realize. (Intently:) You do not experience your space-time world, then, from one but from many viewpoints.

Joseph was “picking up” on lives that “he” lived in the same time scheme. In this way and in your terms, he was beginning to recognize the familyship that exists between individuals who share your earth at any given time.

Each identity has free will, and chooses its environment as a physical stance in space and time. Those involved in a given century are working on particular problems and challenges. Various races do not simply “happen,” and diverse cultures do not just appear. The greater self “divides” itself, materializing in flesh as several individuals, with entirely different backgrounds — yet with each embarked upon the same kind of creative challenge.

Each will choose his or her own framework, according to the intents of the consciousness of which each of you is an independent part. In such a fashion are the challenges and opportunities inherent in a given “time” worked out.

You are counterparts of yourselves, but as Ruburt would say (amused), living “eccentric”¹¹ counterparts, each with your own abilities. So Joseph “was” Nebene, a scholarly man, not adventurous, obsessed with copying ancient truths, and afraid that creativity was error; authoritative and demanding. He feared sexual encounter, and he taught rich Roman children.

In greater terms, these experiences all occur at once. The black woman followed nothing but her own instincts (and very vividly, too). I do not want to give too much background here, and hence rob our Joseph of discoveries that he will certainly make on his own — but (louder) the woman bowed only to the authority of her own emotions, and those emotions automatically put her in conflict with the [British colonial] politics of the times.

Give us a moment … Joseph’s focus of identity is his own. He will follow it. He was not Nebene, or the Roman officer or the woman. Yet they are versions of what he is, and he is a version of what they “were,” and at certain levels each is aware of the others. There is constant interaction.¹³

The Roman soldier dreams of the black woman, and of Joseph. There is a reminiscence that appears even in the knowledge of the cells, and a certain correspondence.¹⁴ There are connections then as far as cellular recollection is concerned, and dreams. Now the Roman soldier and Nebene and the woman went their separate ways after death, colon: They contributed to the world as it existed, in those terms, and then followed their own lines of development, elsewhere, in other realities. So each of you exists in many times and places, and versions of yourselves exist in the world and time that you recognize. As you are part of a physical species, so you are a part of a species of consciousness. That species forms the races of mankind that you recognize.

Now: In your terms only, [neither of you] … has a reincarnational future. Give us a moment … You have accepted this as your breaking-off point. In other terms there are three future lives, but your greater intents, as of now, break you off from this system of reality, and you have already journeyed, both of you, into another; and from that other reality I speak. In those terms I am a part of both of your realities. Think of this in terms of other information given this evening, and you may see what I mean.¹⁵

(I fell asleep almost at once when we went to bed. Sitting up beside me, though, smoking a cigarette, Jane got more material on reincarnation and counterparts. “In fact,” she told me the next morning, “I was getting stuff on ‘Unknown’ Reality each time I woke up during the night. I was also reading solid copy in the dream state.” In those cases she received the material “herself” while knowing that it came from Seth.

(Jane’s own counterpart material included variations of Seth’s basic concept. Here’s one of her examples as she described it to me: “We can span a period like a century if we want to. We can be a child at one end of it and an old man or woman at the other … Michelangelo [who lived for 89 years, from 1475 to 1564] decided to span a century himself instead of as three counterparts, say. Since there aren’t any laws about all of this, a great man could choose to do it that way in order to affect our world more with his gifts, from his own personal angles. He wouldn’t necessarily want or need the counterparts, at least for those purposes. He’d have more than enough to offer on his own.”

(This session on counterparts represents a key point in Seth’s discussion of the unknown reality. The reader is directed to Appendix 21 for related material from the recent past, which anticipated tonight’s new concept. Some earlier intimations of the counterpart concept are also briefly discussed there.)

In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, see her material on electron spin in the 702nd session after 10:22.

4. See the first two sessions in Chapter 13 of Personal Reality.

5. See Appendix 12. In it I quote Seth from the class session for June 23, 1970, as excerpted in the Appendix for Seth Speaks: “In this reality, [each of] you very nicely emphasize all the similarities which bind you together; you make a pattern of them, and you very nicely ignore all the dissimilarities … If you were able to focus your attention on the dissimilarities, merely those that you can perceive but do not, then you would be amazed that mankind can form any idea of an organized reality.”

6. Here Seth refers to Through My Eyes — the book he suggested (in December 1972) that I write on the Seth phenomenon and other subjects. In Volume 1, see item No. 3 at 11:35, in Session 683. Replying to all of those who have asked: So far I haven’t had the time to do more than short essays on art, Seth, the fairly recent deaths of my parents, and a few other topics for Through My Eyes. Certainly I won’t be able to work steadily on the project until Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality is ready for publication.

7. A note added later: Considering what was to come in “Unknown” Reality, though, I’m very glad I did decide to present “the following material” here.

8. See the quotations from Seth about the moment point in Note 11 for Appendix 12. One of the references also included in that note can be traced back to his material on reincarnation, moment points, and dreams in the 668th session for Chapter 19 of Personal Reality.

10. This note is as much for my own edification as it is for anyone else’s. The definitions are from Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, © 1970 by The World Publishing Company, New York and Cleveland:

11. With some humor, Seth borrowed the word “eccentric” from Jane’s own Psychic Politics. In her book she uses the term in connection with personality, to mean that each physical self is a creative — and unpredictable — version of an inner “heroic” model.

12. My Roman-soldier self might have “followed authority without question,” as Seth states in this (721st) session, yet he must have behaved with more than a little guile. In a private session held some time after he’d finished “Unknown” Reality, Seth again referred to the Roman — doing so because of additional material I’d produced about that first century personality. Seth:

“As a Roman, you pretended to be a follower while you were a man of rank in the military. You had no belief in the conventional gods, yet you were supposed to be conquering lands in their names. You traveled even to Africa. You had a disdain for leaders as liars, and of the masses as followers, and so you were always in one kind of dispute or another with your fellows, and even with the authorities. You were of a querulous nature, yet highly curious, and, again, physically involved.

14. For one example of Jane and Seth on cellular memory (among other subjects), see the 653rd session as it bridges chapters 13 and 14 in Personal Reality. Jane also discussed some of the material in that session in Chapter 17 of Adventures.

Seth refers to evocative situations here, though — one of them possibly being a kind of counterpart relationship among the three of us in another reality.