“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“All I know,” Jane said tonight at 8:50, “is that I want to get back to the sessions again. I don’t care whether we get stuff on “Unknown” Reality, or personal material, or what. Just so we get going — I’m always nervous about starting things up again after a layoff….”¹

(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.

(Jane hasn’t restarted ESP class yet. We’re not sure when we’ll be able to manage that. Class may have to wait until Seth finishes his work on “Unknown” Reality.

(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

(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.)

Dictation (quietly and humorously): The unknown reality appears [to be] invisible only because you do not accept it in your prime series of events. (See the last session.)

You attend to matters that seem to have practical value. Whether or not you understand what space is, you move through it easily. You do not calculate how many steps it takes you to cross a room, for instance. You do not need to understand the properties of space in scientific terms, in order to use it very well. You can see yourselves operate in space, however; to that extent it is a known quality, apparent to the senses. Your practical locomotion is involved with it so you recognize it. Its mysterious or less-known properties scarcely concern you.

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.

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.

The entire subject is very important, however. As far as a true psychology is concerned, individuals who are made aware of the existence of probable realities will no longer feel trapped by events. Your consciousness is at a point where it is beginning to understand the significance of “predictive action” — and predictive action always involves probabilities.

In certain terms (underlined), you are the recognized “result” of all of the decisions you have made up to this point in your life. That is the official⁹ you. You are in no way diminished because other quite-as-official selves are “offshoots” of your own experience, making the choices you did not make, and choosing, then, alternate versions of reality.

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.

(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.

You do this personally in your intimate lives to some degree also, as you view your earlier days. You blot out events that do not fit your present concept of yourself. They literally become nonexistent as far as you are concerned. In such fashion you block out aspects of your own reality — and consciously, at least, cut down on your choices.

Give us a moment … The species as you know it has within it, intrinsically, many abilities and characteristics that go unrecognized because you do not accept them as a part of your biological or spiritual heritage. Therefore they become latent and invisible, practically speaking. The same applies individually, when you deny yourselves the rich mixture of consciousness and experience that is available through a recognition of the manipulation of probable realities.

5. Five months ago, in the 721st session, I noted Jane’s speculations “that ‘Unknown’ Reality might prove to be so long that it could go into two volumes — a probable development I hardly took seriously.”

6. For material on the death — and life — of Rooney, see these sources: in Personal Reality, sessions 638–39 in chapters 9 and 10, respectively; in Dialogues, Part 3.

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.

8. In Chapter 10 for Personal Reality, see the 675th session from 11:51. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, see the 686th session from 10:37.

10. Among the sessions for Personal Reality in which Seth stressed that “the present is the point of power,” see the 657th in Chapter 15.

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.