“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.

(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.”)

Now: Give us a moment.

(Then: “Wait — I’m starting to get something on it,” Jane suddenly said. “He’s found something in my thought patterns he can use …” She sat with her head down. “I’m getting a whole lot of stuff now. I’m embarrassed to say it,” she laughed, “but I’ve got the feeling that if I rubbed right here between my eyes — you know, the third eye thing — I could get a lot more information….”⁷

Now: We will see if we can express some concepts about the self in a new way. In his own Psychic Politics Ruburt has presented from his (psychic) library some information concerning official and unofficial numbers.⁸

Now (eyes open): In the same way the most infinitesimal self is infinite, and the most finite self, carried to the extremes of itself, is infinite. Each of you is part of an infinite self. That infinite self appears as a series of finite selves in your reality.

Beneath that perceived reality, however, each finite self, carried to its degree, is itself infinite. Now here is one for the books (with amusement): but there are different kinds of infinities. There are different varieties of psychological infinities that do not meet — that is, that go off in their own infinite directions.

(Now for a few moments Jane rubbed in a circular motion between her closed eyes.)

Now take your break.

(“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….”

However, in our imaginary assortment there are many such strings, and when a light goes out on one string “it” almost automatically appears on another string. Now generally speaking the lights are all lit at once on any given string, except for those that now and then go out.

7. In all of the sessions, Jane has mentioned the third (or “back”) eye of occult lore only once before — in Session 612 for September 6, 1972 — and she’d been somewhat embarrassed then, too. See the opening excerpts from the 612th session in Appendix 19, with Note 5. In that note I speculated about “what intuitive knowledge she might possess that led her to talk about” the third eye at that time. We had the same questions all over again, without intending to investigate them any more now than we did then.

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.