“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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

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.

Let us go back approximately two months in your time. Ruburt and Joseph were looking for a house. They had already seen one on the inside, as mentioned earlier in “Unknown” Reality.³ This manuscript, for that matter, was begun precisely at the point in time that Ruburt’s and Joseph’s latest adventure with probabilities began. Two months ago, however, they were attracted to “the Foster Avenue house,” as they called it (change the name if you want to). They drove past it often, and went inside. Ruburt imagined his classes being held there. Imaginatively both Ruburt and Joseph saw themselves living there, and a certain amount of psychic energy was projected into that house.

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.

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.

(Loudly.) End of session. It is a good place to end, and to start the next one.

(The questions I referred to concern the fact that once in The Seth Material and nine times in Seth Speaks, by my count, Seth spoke of Atlantis as being in our historical past. He did so this evening also, of course, when he remarked at 10:59 that our “ideas of Atlantis are partially composed of future memories” — thus leaving room for past manifestations. Seth’s theory of simultaneous time, which can encompass the notion of future probabilities projected backward into an apparent past, for instance, leaves great leeway for the interpretation of events or questions, however, and makes the idea of contradiction posed by an Atlantis in the past and one in the future too simple as an explanation. At any given “time,” depending on whatever information he’s given previously, Jane could just as easily quote Seth as placing Atlantis in our historic past, or in a probable past, present, or future — or all four “places” at once, for that matter. Any or all of these views would simply be repatterning other dimensions of time from our “present point of power.”

2. Our “new” hill house is really 21 years old. It seems new to Jane and me, though — and to Seth too, we notice. Calling it new is a pretty convenient way for us to distinguish it from the much older apartment house we vacated last month. Actually, however, we’re using the word “new” to indicate our present physical and psychological states. In that sense, if the house we’ve just moved into was physically older than the one we left behind, I suppose we’d still call it new.

“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.

“Now the future is probable. However, in your terms there are ruins of the civilizations that served as the ‘concrete’ basis for the one Atlantean legend. Those civilizations were scattered. The so-called ruins would not be found in any one place as expected, therefore. There are some beneath the Aegean Sea, and some beneath an offshoot of the Atlantic, and some beneath the Arctic, for the world had a different shape.

“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.