“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.”

This book is concerned with the nature of the unknown reality, and the ways in which it can become known.

You may find some of your most cherished conceptions to be misconceptions in the light of your new experiences. Since explorations are highly personal, you will most likely begin them from the framework of your current beliefs. Symbols may be utilized, and these may change their meaning for you as you progress. The symbols may evolve, therefore. In the beginning of this work I “warned” the reader that here in these sessions we would go beyond ideas of one god and one self.³ I stated that your ideas of personhood would be expanded. As “Unknown” Reality is being produced Ruburt and Joseph are having their own experiences, and uncovering the nature of the unknown reality as it applies to them.

Joseph recently had an experience that disturbed him, simply because it was difficult to interpret even in the light of his understanding about the nature of the self. You cannot explore the nature of reality, hoping to discover its unknown aspects, if you insist that those aspects correspond with the known ones. So Joseph allowed himself some freedom — and then was almost scandalized with the results.

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.

There is indeed a communication existing that joins all of nature, an inner webwork, so that each part of the earth knows what its other parts are doing. Cells are organizations, ever-changing, forming and unforming.

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.

You, as you think of yourself, may have trouble following such concepts, just as you would have trouble trying to follow the “future” reality of the cells within your body at this moment. (Long pause.) You must understand that in greater terms there is no big or small. There is not a giant identity and a pygmy one. Each identity is inviolate. Each also unites with others while maintaining its individuality and developing its own potential.

(10:21.) Let us look at it differently. People who read so-called “occult” literature may consider me “an old soul,” like a mountain. Period. In grand ancient fashion above other more homey village-like souls, I have my own identity. Yet that identity is composed of other identities, each independent, as the mountain is composed of its rocks and could not exist without them, even while it rises up so grandly above the plain. My understanding rests upon what I am, as the mountain’s height rests upon what it is. I do not feel invaded by the selves or identities that compose me, nor do they feel invaded by me — any more than the trees, rocks, and grass would resent the mountain shape (intently) into which they have grown.

The top of the mountain can “see further,” colon: Its view takes in the entire countryside. So I can look into your reality, as the top of the mountain can look down to the plain and the village. The mountain peak and the village are equally legitimate.

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 tree does not feel less, itself, because it brings forth such seeds. So identities throw off seeds of themselves in somewhat the same fashion. These may grow up in quite different environments. Their realities in no way threaten the identity of the “parent.” Identities have free choice, so they will pick their environments or birthplaces.

Physically speaking, and generally, your body is composed of grasses and ants and rocks and beasts and birds, for in one way or another all biological matter is related.⁹ In certain terms, through your experience, birds and rocks speak alphabets — and certain portions of your own being fly or creep as birds or insects,¹⁰ forming the great gestalt of physical experience. It is fashionable to say: “You are what you eat” semicolon; that, for example, “You must not eat meat because you are killing the animals, and this is wrong.” But in deeper terms, physically and biologically, the animals are born from the body of the earth, which is composed of the corpses of men and women as much as it is of other matter. The animals consume you, then, as often as you consume them, and they are as much a part of your humanity as you are a part of their so called animal nature.

Ruburt is connected with me in that manner. He is also connected with any ant in the backyard in the same way. Yet I retain my identity, the ant retains its identity, and Ruburt retains his.¹² But one could not exist without the other two — for in greater terms the reality of any one of the three presupposes the existence of the others.

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.”

“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?”

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.”

13. But added a few weeks later: The idea, adopted so enthusiastically by so many class members, didn’t work out after all. Jane and I came to realize that even her students tired of the unending process of writing letters (even about subjects they’re interested in) week after week. “It turned into too much work,” more than one student ruefully admitted. For the flow of letters is constant. Nor, we learned, did some of those who wrote Jane relish receiving a reply from someone else. The result of the experiment was that once more we were thrown back upon our own resources. We do what we can. Our latest attempts to handle the mail are described in the final passages of my Introductory Notes for Volume 1. Seth’s most recent letter to correspondents is presented at the conclusion of those notes.