“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In ordinary terms, I think that during our first month in the hill house we’ve been busy forming a fresh psychic atmosphere within which we can feel comfortable — and that anyone in a similar situation intuitively does the same thing. Perhaps not until a start is made in this way can any of us initiate certain functions in the “new” place. Actually, then, we seek to wed the old environment with the new, using the psyche as a bridge between the two worlds. Now when Jane and I drive past the old house we lived in on Water Street, close by downtown Elmira, we engender within ourselves mixed feelings of strangeness and familiarity. We see the intimately known windows of the two apartments we shared still vacant, the blinds hanging at careless angles. Friends have told us both places are being redecorated to a modest degree. “I’m glad they’re being changed,” Jane said the other day, in a strangely possessive response. “That means the world we had there can’t ever be entered by anyone else.”

(In that big, intriguing house her whole psychic world — and mine — had begun to open up late in 1963; various aspects of that becoming are detailed in her different books. Yet when Jane left the Water Street apartments that day in March, she never looked back: When she’s through with something, she’s through with it. She’s remarkably free in that way. I’m the one who’s apt to become attached to old things, old places, to look back with a bit of nostalgia. Now as we waited for tonight’s session to begin, our 14-year-old cat, Willy, dozed on the couch beside me. At the same time our black cat, Rooney, who’d died in his fifth year, lay in his grave in the backyard of the house on Water Street.⁶

Now, you move through probabilities in much the same way that you navigate in space. As you do not consciously bother with all of the calculations necessary in the process of walking down the street, so you also ignore the mechanisms that involve motion through probable realities. You manipulate through probabilities so smoothly, in fact, and with such finesse, that you seldom catch yourself in the act of changing your course from one probability to another.

(9:34.) Take a very simple action: You stand at a corner, wondering which direction to take. There are four streets involved. You briefly consider streets One and Two, but rather quickly decide against them. You stand for a moment longer, gazing down Street Three, taking in the visual area. You are somewhat attracted, and imagine yourself taking that course. Your imagination places you there momentarily. Inner data is immediately aroused through conscious and unconscious association. Perhaps you are aware of a few memories that dimly come to mind. One house might remind you of one a relative lived in years ago. A tree might be reminiscent of one that grew by your family home. But in that instant, inner computations occur as you consider making a fairly simple decision, and the immediate area is checked against all portions of your knowledge.⁷

You then look at Street Four. The same process happens again. This area also takes your attention. At the same time you almost equally hold in your mind the image of Street Three, for you can see them both at once from this intersection.

Let us say that you are almost equally attracted to both courses. You teeter between probabilities, having the full power to choose one street or the other as physical experience. If you had to stand there and write down all the thoughts and associations connected with each course of action before you made your decision, you might never cross the intersection to begin with. You might be hit by an automobile as you stood there, lost in your musings.

In the same way, it would take you some time to even walk from a table to a chair if you had to be consciously aware of all of the nerves and muscles that must first be activated. But while you stand almost equally attracted by streets Three and Four, then you send out mental and psychic energy in those directions.

Past associations merge with present reality and form a pattern. Mentally, a part of you actually starts out upon each street — a projected mental image. Period. As you stand there, then, in this case two such projected images go out onto streets Three and Four. To some extent these images experience “what will happen” if you yourself take one direction or the other. That information is returned to you instantaneously, and you make your decision accordingly. Say you choose Street Four. Physically you begin to walk in that direction. Street Four becomes your physical reality. You accept that experience in your prime sequence of events. You have, however, already sent out an energized mental image of yourself into Street Three, and you cannot withdraw that energy.

(9:53.) The portion of you that was attracted to that route continues to travel it. At the point of decision this alternate self made a different conclusion: that it experience Street Three as physical reality. The self as you think of it is literally reborn in each instant, following an infinite number of events from the one official series of events that you recognize at any given “time.”