“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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Christian theology sees the end of the world in certain terms, with a grand God coming to reward the good and to punish the wicked.⁶ That system of belief allows for no other probability. Some see the end of the world coming as a greater disaster, or envision man finally ruining his planet. Others see periods of peace and advance — and each probability will happen “somewhere.” However, many of my readers, or their offspring, will be involved in a new dimension of selfhood in which consciousness is fully explored and the potentials of the soul uncovered, at least to some extent.

Theories of probabilities will be seen as practical, workable, psychological facts, giving leeway and freedom to the individual, who will no longer feel at the mercy of external events — but will realize instead that he (or she) is their initiator.

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

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

As simply as I can explain it, your planet is also “divided” into time and probability areas. Period. So many civilizations exist at once, then, and there are certain bleed-throughs. In your terms some civilizations are real and perceivable, and some are not.

(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.”

(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.

“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.

“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.

“In that kind of framework, how can I explain an Atlantis? It exists both in your past and future, a probable world that some of you will choose from a model placed in the past of your future — partially based upon fact, in your terms, but with its greatest validity lying in its possibilities.”