“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(She made her remarks after I’d read her Seth’s last session [the 740th for February 2] from my notes earlier this evening, I still don’t have it typed. Incredibly, that session is already six weeks old. We’ve been involved in so many activities since then that it’s difficult to decide which of them to refer to in these notes, and to what extent. Except for the few listed below, then, it may be sufficient to just state that we’ve been in our hill house for a month, and that after much hard physical labor² we’ve settled down enough to resume our natural rhythms of painting, sessions, books, and play. I have a room I’m converting into a studio, and one in which to work on this manuscript. And for the first time since we married 20 years ago [in 1954], Jane has a room to herself for her own writing — if she chooses to use it. So far she’s preferred to work before the picture window in the living room.

(As if to celebrate our way of life and work in the house on the hill, we were visited last Saturday by Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor at Prentice-Hall, and a publishing colleague of his. One result of our meeting [as I wrote at the beginning of the Introductory Notes for Volume 1], was the decision to publish this long manuscript for “Unknown” Reality in two volumes.⁵

(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

It is as if you had trained yourselves to respond to red lights and to ignore green ones, for example — or as if you read only every third or fourth line on a page of a book.

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

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.

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.”

There is something highly important here concerning your technological civilization: As your world becomes more complicated, in those terms, you increase the number of probable actions practically available. The number of decisions multiplies. You can physically move from one place on the planet to another with relative ease. Centuries ago, ordinary people did not have the opportunity to travel from one country to another with such rapidity. As space becomes “smaller,” your probabilities grow in complexity. Your consciousness handles far more space data now. (In parentheses: I am speaking in your terms of time.) Watching television, you are aware of events that occur on the other side of the earth, so your consciousness necessarily becomes less parochial.⁸ As this has happened the whole matter (smiling) of probabilities has begun to assume a more practical cast. Civilizations are locked one into the other. Politicians try to predict what other governments will do. Ordinary people try to predict what their government might do.

More and more, you are beginning to deal with probabilities as you try to ascertain which of a number of probable events might physically occur. When the question of probabilities is a practical one, then scientists will give it more consideration.

However, it seems to you that all action in the past is fixed and done, while behavior in the future alone is open to change — so the word “prediction” assumes future action. Basically, the past is as open to change as the future is. When you are dealing with historic events you believe that no prediction is involved. Personally and as a species, you are convinced that there is a one-line series of finished events behind you.

(11:05.) Give us a moment … (Pause.) You build smooth structures of beliefs, then look at reality using the beliefs like glasses — tinted ones. Period. Opposing information will literally be invisible to you.¹² It will be ignored or cast aside.

It has been fashionable to think in terms of straight-line evolution, for example. As mentioned earlier in this book,¹³ the accepted theory of evolution is highly simplistic. Your species did not come from one particular source. You have many cousins, so to speak. Some traces of that lineage remain in your time. However, when you look “backward” at the planet you actually try to predict past behavior from the standpoint of the present.

7. Seth gave two blocks of material in Seth Speaks that are analogous to what he tells us here. In Chapter 7, see the 530th session at 9:30, when he discoursed upon our frequent projection of “replica images” or “pseudophysical forms” to vividly desired locations. In the 565th session at 9:30, for Chapter 16, he used the example of one’s possible responses to a telephone call to show how all “probable actions are equally valid,” no matter which one of them is physically actualized.

12. For one of the ways in which Seth explicates the idea that we’re blind to information — or beliefs — that we don’t agree with, see the 617th session for Chapter 3 of Personal Reality.