“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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

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.

I am trying to stretch your imaginations, and to help you throw aside rigid concepts that literally blind you to the dimensions of your own reality. Again — you are biologically equipped to perceive far more of that reality than you do.⁵

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.

Much of this is very difficult to verbalize. (Long pause.) You are not subordinate to some giant consciousness. While you think in such terms, however, I must speak of reincarnational selves and counterparts, because you are afraid that if you climb out of what you think your identity is, then you will lose it.

(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

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.

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.

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.

(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

(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….

(“We’ll take the break and see what happens.”

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.

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.

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.

In Note 1 for Session 739 I wrote that when Jane and I decided to buy the hill house (on February 21, 1975) we learned that the place next to it on the west would soon be for sale. I also commented that it would “be interesting to see what — if any — house connections develop.”

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.