“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.

(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

(Jane lit a cigarette and sipped at a beer. Then she took off her glasses. By the time she laid them on the coffee table between us she was in trance. Speaking as Seth, she began to very comfortably and easily deliver the next session for “Unknown” Reality.)

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.

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.

(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.

(10:23. Jane was very quickly out of a fine trance that had lasted for just over an hour. Willy had slept beside me all of the time, twisting himself into a variety of positions. “I feel relaxed, relieved, and exhausted, now that we’ve started things up again,” Jane said, yawning. “I almost think I could go to bed right now, but I know I won’t. There: I just picked up the next two or three sentences for after break,” she said as she got up and moved about, “but they can wait.”

In The Nature of Personal Reality I stated that the point of action occurs in the present.¹⁰ In Adventures in Consciousness Ruburt said, quite properly, that time experience actually splashed out from the present to form an apparent past and future.¹¹

When you seemingly look backward into time, and construct a history, you do so by projecting your own prime series of events into the past as it is understood. Obviously you read the past from the present, but you also create it from the present as well. You accept certain data — your present recognized series of events — then use that series as a measuring stick, so to speak: It automatically rejects what does not fit. At certain levels of experience this makes little difference. All data agree. No rough spots show.

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.

You alter your experience in each instant, quite drastically. Each individual possesses far vaster opportunities for choice than are realized. You are denied tomorrow’s wisdom only because you believe time is a closed system.¹⁴ It is true that you are subject to birth and death, yet within that framework far greater dimensions of experience are possible than are usually experienced.

You are all counterparts of each other who are alive at any given earth time. By really understanding this you could come to terms with the ideas of brotherhood that religions have taught for so long.

(Still in full trance, her eyes very dark Jane stared at me. Then I watched the Seth personality begin to recede, to fade. Jane blinked a few times, and Seth was gone. 11:26 P.M.)