“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Tonight Jane was so relaxed¹ that I didn’t expect her to hold a session. But at 8:45 she wanted to try — especially since we hadn’t done anything on Monday. “It might be a short one, though,” she said. “Maybe Seth will talk about our own things instead of giving dictation — your material on your father [which I received this past Sunday evening], or what you got on your mother this afternoon. Or maybe he’ll talk about what I got on your mother the other day, or my strands-of-consciousness stuff for Psychic Politics.”

(Jane’s material on strands of consciousness² had actually developed because of my experience involving my father while I was in an altered state of consciousness. That episode had upset me to some degree, but Jane’s discussion of the subject in Politics, plus a few comments Seth made in ESP class last night, helped me put the affair in a more objective light.

In this section, therefore, I have outlined various experiments or exercises for the reader. These will certainly lead you to form your own versions of the exercises given, or will open your mind so that spontaneously, in your own way, you become aware of events that were literally invisible to you before.

In your terms the earth at any given time represents the most exquisite physical, spiritual, and psychic cooperation, in which all consciousnesses are related and contribute to the overall reality. Physically, this is somewhat understood.

Give us a moment … (Then slowly:) It is difficult to explain on spiritual and psychic levels without speaking in terms of gradations of identity, for example, but in your terms even the smallest “particle” of identity is inviolate. It may grow, develop or expand, change alliances or organizations, and it does combine with others even as cells do. (Long pause.) Your body does not feel as if you invade it. Your consciousness and its consciousness are merged; yet it is composed of the multitudinous individual consciousnesses that form the tiniest physical particles within it. Those particles come and go, yet your body remains itself. What was physically a part of you last year is not today. Physically, you are a different person. Put simply, the stuff of the body is constantly returned to the earth,* where it forms again into physical actualization — but always differently.

(Long pause, eyes closed. Jane’s delivery had slowed considerably.) In somewhat the same way your identity changes constantly, even while you retain your sense of permanence. That sense of permanence rides upon endless changes — it is actually dependent upon those physical, spiritual, and psychic changes. In your terms, for example, if they did not occur constantly your body would die. The cells, again, are not simply minute, handy, unseen particles that happen to compose your organs. They also possess consciousnesses of their own. That [kind of] consciousness unites all physical matter.

(10:00.) Give us a moment … Cells compose natural forms. An identity is not a thing of a certain size or shape that must always appear in one given way. It is a unit of consciousness ever itself and inviolate while still free to form other organizations, enter other combinations in which all other units also decide to play a part. As there are different shapes to physical objects, then, so identity can take different shapes — and basically those forms are far more rich and diverse than the variety of physical objects.

Identities, then, do send out “strands of consciousness” into as many realities as possible, so that all versions of any given identity have the potential to develop in as many ways as possible.

A mountain exists. It is composed of rocks and trees, grass and hills, and in your terms of time you can look at it, see it as such, give it a name, and ignore its equally independent parts. Without those parts the mountain would not exist. It is not invaded by the trees or rocks that compose it, and while trees grow and die the mountain itself, at least in your terms of time, exists despite the changes. It is also dependent upon the changes. In a manner of speaking, your own identities as you think of them are dependent upon the same kinds of living organizations of consciousness.

Your thinking mind, as you consider it, is the top of your mountain. In certain terms you can see “more” than your cells can, though they are also conscious of their realities. Were it not for their lives you would not be at the top of your psychological mountain. Even the trees at the highest tip of the hillside send sturdy roots into the ground, and receive from it nourishment and vitality — and there is a great give-and-take between the smallest sapling in the foothills and the most ancient pine. No single blade of grass dies but that it affects the entire mountain. The energy within the grass sinks into the earth, and in your terms is again reborn. Trees, rocks, and grass constantly exchange places as energy changes form (very forcefully, leaning forward, eyes wide and dark).

(“Right now I think I’m getting that everything on the face of the earth is related — that your consciousness is in an ant, or a rock⁸ or a tree, but that we’re not used to thinking that way. Not that one is superior to another — just that we’re all connected — that there’s some kind of weird familiarity, biologically and psychically, that we’ve never gotten consciously … What I’m getting is that your father could do any of the things that you wrote about [in Note 4], without invading anything or anyone. It’s just that our ideas of personhood and soul make it sound terrible, until you get used to those ideas….

The constant interchange that exists biologically means that the same physical stuff that composes a man or a woman may be dispersed, and later form a toad, a starfish, a dog or a flower. It may be distributed into numberless different forms. That arithmetic¹¹ of consciousness is not annihilated. It is multiplied and not divided. Reminiscent within each form is the consciousness of all the other combinations, all of the other alliances, as identity continually forms new creative endeavors and gestalts of relatedness. There is no discrimination, no prejudice.

Through such strands of consciousness all of your world is related. Your own identity sends out strands of itself constantly, then. These mix psychically with other strands, as physically atoms and molecules are interchanged. So there are different organizations of identity in which you play a part.

(11:35.) Give us a moment … Not dictation: All of this should help you understand your own experience involving your father — and the later one with your mother; and, separately, Ruburt’s with your mother, for [Stella Butts] was sending out strands of consciousness in the directions that interest her.

2. Jane originated the phrase, “strands of consciousness” — which she likes very much — some 10 months ago while describing her sleep-state reception of multidimensional material from Seth. See Appendix 4 for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality.

3. Here Seth referred to his material in the 687th session for Volume 1. After 11:07: “I am saying that the individual self must become consciously aware of far more reality; that it must allow its recognition of identity to expand so that it includes previously unconscious knowledge. To do this you must understand, again, that man must move beyond the concepts of one god, one self, one body, one world, as these ideas are currently understood.”

4. In this (725th) session Seth mentions two of my recent inner experiences and one of Jane’s. Each one had to do with strands of consciousness, although in this note I’ll stress only the very unsettling one I had with my “dead” father last Sunday night, December 11.

The material I picked up about my father’s psychic intents was at first very bewildering. Hinted at was such a diffusion of consciousness that at the time individuality seemed to have little meaning. For I glimpsed Robert Butts, Sr. as he decided to disperse “himself” into a series of other personalities in both the past and the near future, so that I wondered how — in that mélange of identities — my father could possibly know himself. Seth’s explanations in ESP class last night and in this evening’s session helped clear my mind considerably, though: According to him, consciousness has no difficulty in making such alliances while maintaining continuity of identity, though its vast abilities are certainly almost impossible for us to grasp.

In class yesterday evening, Seth first came through with some very earthy material that’s presented as Appendix 24. Then Jane read her notes on strands of consciousness, which — I can add later — also found their way into Chapter 12 of Politics. Seth soon returned in class with the following comments; he referred to Jane’s ideas mainly, yet as he talked I began to understand my experience with my father and his after-death situation as I perceived it.

“There are no ceilings to the self, and no boundaries set about you. There is no place where identity need stop — yours or anyone else’s. Now, if you want to rest for a while in the familiar privacy of your self-adopted selfhood, then that is all right. But if you discover paths or ‘strands of consciousness’ leading from yourself into other realities, then follow them….

“What selves do you encounter in time? And what makes you think that those selves exist in time as you understand it only? Why does it seem impossible that other strands of consciousness go to you and out from you constantly?”

A student asked: “What’s the difference between a strand of consciousness and an identity?”

And added over a year later: Note 35 for Appendix 18 contains excerpts from the 775th session. See Seth’s comments on the patterns of identity formed by consciousness, with their “particleized” and “wavelike” characteristics.

5. Seth meant his CU’s, or basic units of consciousness, of course, which he discussed in sessions 682–84 in Volume 1. See the 682nd session after 9:47: “These units can indeed appear in several places at once….”

7. Seth first discussed his blueprints for reality in Session 696 for Volume 1: “Each probability system has its own set of ‘blueprints,’ clearly defining its freedoms and boundaries, and setting forth the most favorable structures capable of fulfillment … As an individual you carry within you such a blueprint … The information is knit into the genes and chromosomes, but it exists apart … In the same fashion the species en masse holds within its vast inner mind such working plans or blueprints.”

8. Strange — but recently I visually approached the idea of interrelated consciousnesses in two pen-and-ink drawings for Jane’s book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time: I incorporated humanoid features on large rocks. Resting in their natural outdoor world, these entities are subject to even the smallest change in their objective weather. But so are we — and might not both rock and human also respond to a uniting psychological weather?

12. While reading those passages on identity, the reader might keep in mind the subject matter of Appendix 18: the complicated relationships involving Jane, Ruburt, and Seth.