“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Just before the session Jane began to edge into an altered state of consciousness other than the one she uses for her “Seth trance,” as she put it. For a few moments she sat quietly with her eyes closed. She felt “the idea, mentally, of something shaped like a television screen” off to her right. By now I was writing down what I could. “And now it’s coming closer. I don’t know what it is, or what it has to do with the session, if anything.” She paused, then resumed in the past tense: “It came up fairly close to me. I walked through it and down a long chute. There were coils in there. They did things with me — healing things — then dropped me back in my chair.

(“I had the feeling that Seth was in this chute or tunnel, in miniature, and that he looked like he does in your portrait of him, only in full length.”¹

(Back to the present: “Oh — he comes forward, then retreats, oscillating real fast. But in some way the Seth thing in this is in the background. Now he’s turning around, this miniature Seth. He’s walking away, out of the chute and into this great big Seth who’s like a statue.

(“Then in the eyes of this Seth there are two little Seths looking out. Both of these images are like your portrait. Now they climb out of the eyes; with their bodies they make a garland around the big Seth’s head; they sit on it back-to-back like a pair of bookends.” Pause, eyes closed. “Wow — a whole bunch of these little Seths climb up on top of the giant head — but in perfect poses. They’re very stylized, but all real. And Seth will explain it,” Jane abruptly said, evidently quite surprised. “The little images face in all directions around the head of the big Seth. I know it’s not right, not a good analogy, but they’re like gargoyles on a steeple….

(“It’s all very distant now. I never saw the entire giant-sized figure of Seth. The head and the arms were clearest. The whole thing was an immeasurable distance from me.”

(After another pause: “Okay, I think we can have a session now. But until Seth said so, I didn’t know he’d explain any of this.”)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

Each one is involved in its own context of reality, each one pursuing its own directions for its own purposes. One of those “Seths” was born in your space and time. That Seth then seeded himself, so to speak, in the space-time environment you recognize — appearing through the centuries, sending out offshoots of “himself,” exploring earthly experience and developing as well as he could those potentials of his own greater identity that could best be brought to fruition within a creature context.²

That one Seth was endowed with his own inner blueprint. The blueprint gave him an idea of his potentials, and how they could be best fulfilled in earthly terms.³

Give us a moment … The self, as I have said [many times] before, is not limited. It can therefore split off from itself without being less. This Seth might be “born” two or three times in one century — or more — and then in your terms not appear for five or ten centuries. Each Seth would be completely independent, however, and each appearance would signify the creation of a new personality — not simply a new version of an old one.

(10:11. I think that in his delivery since 9:53 especially, Seth did a good job of making some important points in a very brief way.

(Jane’s rather intent delivery had slowed noticeably during the last 10 minutes. “Boy,” she said, “I was getting stuff toward the end that neither of us — Seth or me — could verbalize. There wasn’t anything in my thought patterns that he could make words out of to express what he wanted to say. I vaguely felt it, but it was pretty alien to my psychological experience.” At the moment, at least, I couldn’t recall hearing her voice such ideas just that way before in the sessions.⁶

(Jane didn’t rub between her eyes — and without leaving her chair she went back into the session within a very few minutes. Her eyes were closed. Her delivery was so subdued at first that I wondered if she was using her Seth voice. Resume at 10:15.)

(10:36. “Wow,” Jane exclaimed as she emerged from her short but excellent delivery. “Before the session I didn’t feel a thing. I was just sort of happily dopey — no ideas at all. But I really clicked in before this break. Seth finally found something he could use to make analogies. I wasn’t aware of traffic noise or anything else … The whole thing surprises me: Look what I’d have missed if I’d decided not to have a session. And I didn’t know Seth was going to explain those visions until I got that flash from him just before he came through. I have the feeling that inside that experience I traveled a great distance….”

(Concerning Seth’s remark about “a simple move from one house to another” for Jane and me: This includes all of the other people involved, too. In the previous five sessions I’ve inserted just enough “house connections” to indicate what’s been materializing for us in this area, without digressing to write a much longer history. Our list of such interrelationships contains over 40 items so far, and continues to grow. However, many of these are made up of several related events, figures, et cetera, and so could be legitimately divided further if we chose to do so.¹¹

(“I’m just waiting,” Jane said finally, after we’d each had a little something to eat. “I feel unsettled. I think there’s another bunch of material there. Seth’s going to get it if I can do it — if he can find some more thought patterns he can use.” A long pause. “Now, I’ll try….”

(“A singular ‘its’ but a plural ‘infinities’?” I asked. Jane, as Seth, nodded in agreement.)

1. See the picture section in Prentice-Hall’s editions of The Seth Material for a cropped, black-and-white reproduction of my oil portrait of Seth, “in the form in which he chose to appear to Rob,” as Jane wrote in Chapter 8 of that book. Seth first announced his presence by name in the 4th session for December 8, 1963; I painted him in 1966.

2. Quite a few of the diagrams I drew for Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness (which is to be published by Prentice-Hall in the spring of 1975) illuminate Seth’s material in this paragraph. See the opening notes for Session 718 of “Unknown” Reality.

3. Seth discussed his “blueprints for reality” a number of times in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality. See the 696th session, for instance: “Each probability system has its own set of ‘blueprints,’ clearly defining its freedoms and boundaries … These are not ‘inner images of perfection,’ and to some extent the blueprints themselves change … As an individual you carry within you such a blueprint, then; it contains all the information you require to bring about the most favorable version of yourself in the probable system you know … In the same fashion the species en masse holds within its vast inner mind such working plans or blueprints.”

5. In the 685th session for Volume 1, Seth stated that the consciousnesses of our cells are eternal, and that biologically we’re equipped to explore many more probable realities than we know. In the 686th session he discussed our cells’ comprehension of the past, present, and future, as well as our cellular responses to a variety of neurological pulses besides that certain range we’re egotistically focused upon. See his first delivery for that session.

6. But in appendixes 4 and 5 for Volume 1, see Jane’s own material on other-than-usual neurological pulses, or speeds. Seth examined our neurological pulses — and habits — at 12:19 in Session 686.

8. We think it quite likely that Seth’s material in this delivery, and some of Jane’s in Politics, grew out of reading we did earlier this month on “new” forms of mathematics — which embody some ideas that are actually many centuries old. Involved, however, are very interesting “nonstandard” methods of regarding time, quantum theory, the infinite and the infinitesimal in numbers, model theory, and other mathematical tools.

At least as she understands these concepts, Jane — and Seth — “took off” from them in individual, creative ways. For Chapter 19 of Politics (which is to be published in 1976) Jane transcribed from her library, in part: “If you imagine the official numbers 1 to 10 in a row, then there would be an infinite number of unofficial 1’s hidden in the 1 you saw, and an infinite number of spaces between the official 1 and 2. The position of the 1 on the paper would represent our sense-data world, while the invisible 1’s behind the official 1 would represent the official 1’s hidden values and infinite probabilities.”

There are, of course, close relationships concerning this delivery of Seth’s for the 740th session, the material in this note, and the musical analogies Seth presented in the 735th session, when he discoursed upon the inaudible variations inherent in the compositions played by the young classical guitarist who’d visited us over the weekend of February 2. (I’ve been saving this reference for this particular note.) At 9:45, for instance, in that 735th session: “An infinite number of other ‘alternate’ compositions were also latent within the [first] note, however … They were quite as legitimate as the compositions that were played … and … added silent structure and pacing to the physically actualized music.”

For the same session Seth also offered evocative analogies involving heard and unheard musical compositions on the one hand, and counterpart, probable, and reincarnational selves on the other.

11. This house connection is a good example of the kind that’s not only made up of a number of related elements, but extends over a longer period of time. Because of those combined attributes, I’m adding this note to the (740th) session in October 1975, six months after Seth finished dictating Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. All names have been changed.

Such connections and questions, whatever their strength and the conscious or unconscious motivations behind them, make a fascinating area for study. Once again, we were reminded of Seth’s material at 11:25 for the 737th session, when he told us that “movers are in league with each other.”

12. Seth’s ideas in this paragraph and the one just preceding it are consistent with his material in a number of sessions for Volume 1. In sessions 681 and 684, for instance, he discussed the on-off fluctuations of our physical universe and everything within it, moment points, probabilities, Jane’s sensations of massiveness, the basic unpredictable motion of any wave or atom, and much more. In sessions 682–83, he stressed the nature of his CU’s, or units of consciousness. Then in Volume 2, Seth likened his own identity to that of a wave formation; see the excerpts from the 775th session in Appendix 18, with Note 35.

One of those steps in Jane’s self-directed search for understanding is referred to in Note 5 for Session 681 (in Volume 1), which contains three lines from her poem, More Than Men. She wrote it in 1954, when she was 25 years old. That was the year we married. The Seth material’s inception lay nine years ahead of us; neither of us knew what mediumship was. Yet, as Jane said recently: “It was there in the poetry all the time, only I didn’t understand.” Now I want to offer that poem in full.