“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.

The giant image of myself, never clearly glimpsed by Ruburt, represents my own greater reality. In a particular fashion, that identity cannot be fully expressed within the confines of any one form, any more than yours can. Period. Ruburt saw many miniature versions of me. In his inner vision these appeared as identical, simply so that he would identify them as portions of myself. They are actually quite different, one from the others.

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.

(9:53.) You are used to thinking of exterior organizational patterns. You might live in a city and a state and a country at one time, yet you do not think that your presence in one of these categories contradicts either of the other two. So you live amid psychic organizations, each having its own characteristics. You may consider yourself Indian though you live in America, or American though you live in Africa, or Chinese though you live in France, and you are quite able to retain your sense of individuality.

Give us a moment … (A one-minute pause.) You are not a miniature self, an adjunct to some superbeing, never to share fully in its reality. (Long pause.) In those terms you are that superself — looking out of only one eye, or using just one finger.

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.

There are infinite versions of yourself, but no one negates the others, and each is connected with the others, and aids and supports them. There are other quite legitimate numerical systems that you do not follow. There are other kinds of psychological organizations also. In those terms Ruburt has learned, or rather Ruburt is learning, to alternate a series — to bring information from one [neurological series] to another, so to speak.

However, none of this is apart from normal living. Whether or not they want to mention it here in “Unknown” Reality, both Ruburt and Joseph have learned to correlate data so that some of the implications involved in a simple move from one house to another become apparent. They are not mathematicians. They will not statistically analyze the results. Yet I tell you that the moves that you make in daily life have indeed infinite effects — and I am not using the word loosely.

(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

(A query: With the individual analyses done, would it be possible to incorporate them all into one masterwork? Such a project would be a formidable one, I think, and would take at least a book in itself.

Imagine a string of different-colored Christmas tree lights, all glowing on a given tree. In this series of lights, any one light can go out while the others continue to shine. You are familiar with that arrangement.

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.

Pretend that you are very tiny, and moving slowly about the tree so that you see only one light at a time. It appears that one light exists before the other, then, and each one is so brilliant to your focus that it blots out the lights before and after it. You may have a dim memory of the light you “saw” before, however, and so you think: “Aha, the bulb I see is my life, but I’m sure that long ago I had a different life — and perhaps another one lies ahead of me.” But unless you step far back from the tree you will not realize that the entire string of lights exists at once. Nor will you understand that when one light goes out in a strand it appears somewhere else on the tree in another strand.

If you were still tinier, then any given bulb itself might seem to emit not a steady light at all, but a series of waves, and you might identify your life with any given wave, so that great distance might be perceived between one wave and the next.¹²

A tree could be wired with lights, with each one having its own particular series [of waves]. The people who put up the tree might experience one Christmas Eve, while other consciousnesses, tuned in to the different series, could experience endless generations¹³ — and their perceptions would be quite as legitimate as those of the light-watchers who had erected the tree.

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.

Not long after we moved into the hill house (in March) our new acquaintance and next door neighbor to the east, Frank Corio, told us he knows Louise Akins; she was one of the first students to attend Jane’s ESP class, in September 1967. An interesting tidbit, we thought, considering that Elmira is a city of close to 50,000 people, and in turn is surrounded by a similar number residing in smaller communities. I added Frank’s information to our list of house connections, then forgot about it.

The odds against such a “coincidence” developing would be astronomical — except that the Millers had lived in a neighborhood close to the hill house several years ago (when the acquaintanceship with Louise Akins had been made), had moved out of state, then returned to buy the house next door to us. The house connection is still unique, however, considering that in the hill house Jane and I found ourselves bracketed east and west by people who knew one of her early students — who had in turn mentioned Jane to them. Interesting, that Frank Corio had been instrumental in bringing the Millers back to their favorite neighborhood, when in a city the size of Elmira there are at any time a number of homes for sale in “desirable” neighborhoods, including “ours.”

Jane and I certainly don’t think the fact that Frank and Mrs. Miller know Louise Akins was the reason the Millers moved next door to us, yet it is one factor to be considered among a myriad of others — money, availability, and so forth. Why did Jane and I move into a neighborhood in which such a house connection could develop to begin with? Why was Frank Corio assigned the task of selling the house next door to us? Why did the Millers encounter him at just that particular time, and why was he, of all the real estate agents in Elmira, the one who succeeded in selling them the house they bought?

In concluding this note, I should add that our neighbor, Frank Corio, was involved in other house connections with Jane and me — some of them quite as intriguing as the one just described.

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.