“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In ESP class last night Jane told all of her loyal students, some of whom have been with her almost from the time she began holding such meetings in the summer of 1967, that class was suspended until we’d moved into the hill house and settled down a bit — however long that might take.

(Jane and I were inside “our” hill house for only the second time this afternoon. Again we were accompanied by a real estate agent; because of insurance regulations we’re not allowed to have a key to the place yet, although we’ve been told that this dilemma will be resolved very soon. In the meantime I’ve begun what seems to be an awesome task: packing many of our possessions into an endless series of cartons that had once held things like wine, mayonnaise, cereal, pipe fittings, and so forth.

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

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.

What I am saying here applies to the greater identity of each reader. Give us a moment … Because you are usually so worried about preserving what you think of as your identity, we use terms like reincarnational selves or counterparts. If you truly understood the nature of your individuality, however, you would clearly see that there is no contradiction if I say that you are uniquely yourself, that your individuality has an indestructible validity that is never assailed, and when I also say that you are at the same time connected with other identities, each as sacredly inviolate as your own.

(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.

Certain families have a liking for certain months of birth,⁴ but no specific rules apply. There is indeed an inner kind of order that unites all of these issues; yet that inner order is not the result of laws, but of spontaneous creation, which flows into its own kinds of patterns. You see the patterns at any given time and try to make laws of them.

You think in terms of linear time, and the best you can do to imagine your deeper reality is to consider reincarnation in time. It is a matter of focus. You usually identify with the outside of yourself, and with the outside of the world. You do not, for example, usually identify with the inside of your body, with its organs, much less its cells or atoms — yet in that direction lies a certain kind of infinity (intently).

If you would identify with your own psychological reality, following the inward structure of thoughts and feelings, you would discover an inward psychological infinity. These “infinities” would reach of course into both an infinite past and future. Yet true infinity reaches far beyond past or future, and into all probabilities — not simply straightforward into time, or backward.

(Jane and I do not ascribe the elements making up our house adventures to that old catchall, “coincidence,” of course; at the same time we have no plans to statistically attempt anything with them either. So many variables are present that a separate analysis would be required for each individual involved — with “boundaries,” say, set as to the number of items to be considered in each case. Then what about temporal boundaries? Truly, for myself the whole house thing had its origins in my early childhood, over half a century ago. But Jane, being younger, would designate quite different limitations in time….

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.

The soul, so-called, is not related to size or duration in space and time, except insofar as it is wedded to experience within those contexts.

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.”

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.

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.

And: “It’s significant that we apply numbers to time, but as there are unrecognized spaces between numbers, there are unrecognized spaces (psychologically invisible) between or within moments, and some of the events of our bodies are ‘too small’ for us to follow, focused as we are in our prime series. These body events actually are ‘infinitesimal but infinite,’ following their own patterns that merge with ours.”

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.

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?

13. In retrospect we can see how the mystical Jane has always tried to intuitively penetrate the nature of reality through her art; I’ve illustrated that learning process by presenting selections from her early poetry at apropos times throughout the two volumes of “Unknown” Reality. I also gave some background information on Jane’s nature (with a poem) in Appendix 1 for Volume 1.

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.

And our time’s eons are far less than breath