“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. The whole idea of probable realities seems strange or esoteric only because you are not used to following your own thought processes.

You shut them off any time they do not conform to current beliefs about the nature of the self, or about reality in general. The deepest meanings of probabilities lie, however, precisely in their psychological import.

(Pause.) You have become so hypnotized by a one-level kind of thought that anything else seems impractical. You concentrate upon those decisions that you make, and disregard the processes involved. This has been carried to an extreme, you see: Often you are so disconnected from those inner workings that your own decisions then appear to come from someplace else. You may be convinced that events happen to you, and are beyond your control, simply because you are so out of touch with yourself that you never catch the moments of your own decisions.

Then you feel as if you are the pawns of fate, and the idea of probable actions seems like the sheerest nonsense. Each event seems inevitable. If this attitude is carried to excessive lengths, then it even appears that you have no hand at all in the making of your own reality. You will always feel yourself a victim.

The unknown reality is your psychic, spiritual, and psychological one, and from it your physical experience springs.¹

That inner, all-pervasive existence becomes known to the extent that you grow more responsive to your own inner environment. This does not mean that you become entirely self-centered, blind to the rest of the world. It does not mean that you must meditate for hours, or study your own thought processes with such vigor that you ignore other activities. It simply means that you are aware of your own life as clearly as possible — in touch with your thought processes, aware of them but without overdue concern or overanalysis. They are as much a part of your inner environment as trees are of your exterior world. There are different species of selves in the same fashion. There are different species of worlds.

New paragraph (as Seth often declares). When you identify with only one particular level of your thought processes, however, the others — when you sense them — appear alien. You begin to feel threatened, determined to uphold your old ideas of selfhood. Plants grow many leaves. One leaf does not threaten the existence of others, and the plant is not jealous of its own foliage. So there is no need to protect your own individuality because it may send out other shoots into probable realities. This is simply the self growing in different directions, spreading its seeds.

(Pause at 9:52, eyes closed.) Joseph and Ruburt have moved into a “new”² house. In so doing they have traveled through probabilities, as each of my readers has under similar circumstances. (Long pause.) They identify with the selves who moved into the new “hill house.” In a sense they are different people now than they were when “Unknown” Reality was begun (some 14 months ago). However, many of my readers are also different people now than they were when they began to read this work.

In a probable reality, a Ruburt and a Joseph now live there. In the world that you recognize as official, however, they moved into the hill house. To some extent both of them are aware of the inner processes involved in the final decision. I do not mean that they are simply familiar with the exterior thought processes involved, such as: “The hill house is better constructed,” or “It has a fine view.” I am speaking of deeper mechanisms of consideration (pause), in which correlations are made between interior and exterior realities. (Pause.) It is obvious that when you move from one place to another you make an alteration in space — but you alter time as well, and you set into motion a certain psychological impetus that reaches out to affect everyone you know. (Long pause.) When a house is vacant all of the people in the neighborhood send out their own messages. To a certain extent any given inhabited area forms its own “entity.” This applies to the smallest neighborhood⁴ and to the greatest nation. Such messages are often encountered in the dream state. Empty houses are psychic vacancies that yearn to be filled. When you move, you move into other portions of your own selfhood.⁵

(10:11. “I’ve been doing this book for so long by now,” Jane commented, “that I don’t know if it’s a great big sprawling thing without any order, or what. I’ve lost all track of whatever sense of continuity it’s got,” she amended. “When I come out of trance I don’t know what the thing’s all about….” Out of habit, Jane — and consequently Seth — still talked about “Unknown” Reality as being one entity, even though just five days ago we’d learned from her editor that it would be published in two volumes.

(The tenor of Seth’s material tonight led me to think that he was close to finishing “Unknown” Reality, but since Jane evidently didn’t feel that way I said nothing about it. Resume at 10:29.)

In fact, you move into new areas of the self all of the time. The species is now entering such a phase, a period in which it will come more into its own. Mankind will be entering its own new house, then — but the physical changes will be the results of interior ones, and alterations in main lines of probabilities.

Human capabilities will be seen as what they are, and a great new period of development will occur, in which all concepts of selfhood and reality will be literally seen as “primitive superstition.” The species will actually move into a new kind of selfhood.

Now, you squeeze the great fruit of your selfhood into a tiny uneasy pulp, unaware of the sweetness of its juices or the variety of its seasons. You look at the outsides of yourselves as if a peach were aware only of its skin. In the reality I foresee, however, people will become familiar with far greater aspects of themselves, and bring these into actualization. They will be in touch with their own decisions as they make them.

In this probability of which I speak, the species will begin to encounter the great challenge inherent in fulfilling the vast untouched (forcefully) — underlined — potential of the human body and mind. (Long pause.) In that probable reality, to which each of you can belong to some extent, each person will recognize his or her inherent power of action and decision, and feel an individual sense of belonging with the physical world that springs up in response to individual desire and belief.⁷

(10:59.) Give us a moment … (Jane, in trance, lit a cigarette. ) Your ideas of Atlantis are partially composed of future memories. They are psychic yearnings toward the ideal civilization — patterns within the psyche, even as each fetus has within it the picture of its own most ideal fulfillment toward which it grows.

The species then moves into its own new houses. Atlantis is the story of a future probability projected backward into an apparent past.

(“I don’t know why, but I sometimes think that it’s a tremendous strain to do this — have these sessions, and so forth — but I’m determined to explore this reality as much as I can, to get all I can out of it. Then sometimes I think there’s nothing to it. Everyone has their hassles, so why should I have any more — or less? I really think I have less trouble than a lot of people.”

(After this evening’s session, however, we decided we’d like to know why in Seth’s view Atlantis had moved from its long, if uneasy residence in our “historical past” forward into a future probable reality. We resolved to ask him to explain — but strangely enough, I note later, a month passed before we got around to a session on the subject. By then, Seth had been through with “Unknown” Reality for three weeks. Now I refer the reader to Note 11 for quotations from the session, the 747th, in question.)

1. This is a good place to insert these excerpts from the session Seth gave for ESP class on February 16, 1971, three years before starting “Unknown” Reality. While it leads to a number of questions, his material still sums up certain important meanings that lie behind or within the overall concept of probable realities.

“Now I am going to say good evening shortly, but remember — you call this your universe and your reality, and it is indeed, for you form it. Within you also is the knowledge of other great experiments that are being tried, just as other probable systems are aware of the experiments you are involved with. I am speaking in your terms only, which means that to some extent I am hedging — but other civilizations have gone your route. Some have failed, but the inhabitants of some earths have succeeded very well.

“As you think of it, your future is not set. You can follow any road you choose, but — until you realize that as individuals you each form your own personal life, and have a part in the mass creation of reality — there is much learning ahead for you. This is a lesson you are meant to fully understand within physical reality.

“You are meant to judge physical reality. You are meant to realize that it is a materialization of your thoughts and feelings and images, that the inner self forms that world. In your terms, you cannot be allowed to go into other dimensions until you have learned the great power of your thoughts and subjective feelings. So even when you think you destroy, you destroy nothing. And when you think you kill, you kill nothing. When you imagine that you can annihilate a reality, you can only assault it as you know it. The reality itself will continue to exist.

“Because you cannot follow a thought, you wonder where it has gone; has it fallen off some invisible cliff in your mind? But because you can no longer hold that thought in consciousness does not mean it no longer exists, that it does not have a reality of its own, for it does indeed. And if a world escapes you — if you cannot follow it and think it has been destroyed — then the same thing applies to the world as to the thought. It continues to live.

Much in these passages fits in with material I’ve presented in Appendix 12, on the reasons behind the pain and suffering in the world. Early in that appendix, then, see the quotations from the 580th session for Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks, and from the 634th session for Chapter 8 of Personal Reality.

5. I borrowed liberally from these very perceptive lines of Seth’s in order to conclude the Epilogue for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality.

7. Naturally, Seth’s discussion since break reflects much of his material throughout Personal Reality. Then in Volume 1, see his comments just before 11:26 for Session 687: “I am saying that the individual self must become consciously aware of far more reality … Your species is in a time of change. There are potentials within the body’s mechanisms, in your terms, not as yet used. Developed, they can immeasurably enrich the [species] … If some changes are not made, the [species] as such will not endure.”

“Atlantis. First of all, take it for granted — as you do — that your ideas about the age of the earth are erroneous. There were intelligent human beings far earlier than is supposed; and because you assume a one-line kind of progression from an apelike creature to man, you ignore any evidence that shows to the contrary. There were highly developed human beings with elaborate civilizations, existing simultaneously with what you might call animal kingdoms — that is, more or less organized primeval animal tribes, possessing their own kinds of ‘primitive’ cultures.

“Those species did not vie for domination of the earth, but simply shared the same general environment with the more sophisticated groupings beyond their own perimeters. There were many highly technical human cultures, but in your terms not on a global scale. The legend of Atlantis is actually based upon several such civilizations. No particular civilization is the basis, however. Apart from that, the legend as picked up, so to speak, by Plato (see Appendix 14) was a precognition of the future probability, an image of an inner civilization of the mind actually projected outward into the future, where it would be used as a blueprint, dash — the lost grandeur, as, in other terms, Eden became the lost garden of paradise.

“In far greater terms (louder, humorously), at the risk of repeating myself, time is simultaneous, so those civilizations exist along with your own. Your methods of dating the age of the earth are very misleading.

“All That Is creates its reality as it goes along. Each world has its own impetus, yet all are ultimately connected. The true dimensions of a divine creativity would be unendurable for any one consciousness of whatever import, and so that splendor is infinitely dimensionalized (most intensely throughout), worlds spiraling outward with each ‘moment’ of a cosmic breath; with the separation of worlds a necessity, and with individual and mass comprehension always growing at such a rate that All That Is multiplies itself at microseconds, building both pasts and futures and other time scales you do not recognize. Each is a reality in itself, with its own potentials, and with no individual consciousness, however minute, ever lost.