“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I read the last part of Wednesday’s session to Jane from my notes. “I’ve got the nostalgic, uneasy feeling that he’s going to wind up the book soon,” she said, “especially after listening to that material just before the Atlantis stuff: I didn’t feel that way when I had the session, but I do now. I’ve said it before, I know, but this book started when we were thinking of moving, and now we’re settled in a new place, so that makes a good time to end it.”

Dictation: No book entitled The “Unknown” Reality can hope to make that reality entirely known.

It remains nebulous because it is consciously unrealized. The best I can do is to point out areas that have been relatively invisible, to help you explore, actually, different facets of your own consciousness.² To some extent this book has been written to help you exercise your own intuitive and mental capacities from a different viewpoint.

In a way, it is meant to familiarize you with elements of your own reality of which you may have been unaware, and to introduce you to certain subjective states of mind that are automatically aroused because of the manner in which the book was produced. Period.

I am well aware that the book raises many more questions than it presents answers for, and this has been my intent. The unknown reality will become known to the extent that you form new questions, and forget the old frameworks in which answers and myths were automatically given in response. If this book “works,” then many old questions will be seen as relatively meaningless, formed not after any intimate encounter with basic issues, but in response to old dogmas.

Give us a moment … Many of the questions you think were not answered in this book, however, have been answered — but from a different angle, colon: the answers presented in such a way that they will entice you to further creative thought.

Give us a moment … This book itself, because of the method of its production, is an excellent example of the unknown reality becoming, if not “known,” then recognized. Do not look for neat answers or tidy solutions, for when you do your explanations and theories will always be too small. There is always an unknown reality to some extent, for the miracle of your being works outside of the kind of explanations that you so often seem to require.

(Long pause.) The unknown reality, dash — Many of you, I know, would like to find in this book answers pertaining to Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, UFO’s³, and many other such questions. Those matters certainly seem pertinent in the framework of your experience and beliefs. You already have a great variety of explanations offered: Writers in many fields have produced books about such topics. By far the greater questions, however, are those pertaining to the unknown reality of the psyche, and those that relate to the kind of being who perceives in one way or another an Atlantis, a Bermuda Triangle, a UFO — for in greater terms, until you ask deeper questions about yourselves, these other experiences will remain mysterious. You cannot understand perceived events unless you understand who perceives them. You must learn more about the slant of your own consciousness before you are in a position to ask truly pertinent questions about the reality that you perceive.

There are many who will give you answers to such questions. The answers will be couched in a framework of beliefs that you have held individually and collectively for some time. In this book I am purposely trying to lead you into a larger, more expansive way of looking at yourself and the world in which you live.

This book had no chapters [in order] to further disrupt your accepted notions of what a book should be. There are different kinds of organizations present, however, and in any given section of the book, several levels of consciousness are appealed to at once. (Intently:) The threads of the work are interwoven so that various portions of your consciousness are sent out, so to speak, on separate journeys of thought and imagination. Yet these side trips are also related. They intertwine, not only through the psychic organization that I have given to “Unknown” Reality, but because of the great uniting nature within the consciousness of each reader.

Again, Ruburt and Joseph have moved to a new place. Each reader has also journeyed to a new position within the psyche, however. This book is a bridge between realities. Reading it, each person sets out upon a psychic pilgrimage through the unknown realities of his or her own consciousness and experience. No one can predict the destination.

(And louder:) End of dictation. End of book. Take a break.

(“I’d rather be starting a book than ending one, I guess.” She sat quietly. I thought she wanted to cry, but wouldn’t let herself do so.

(“I do have a couple of questions,” I continued. “We can talk about them before break ends. I’d like to add them to the book material tonight — along with Seth’s answers, that is.”

(When Jane sat down again I read the questions to her. Our cat, Willy, jumped up into her lap. “I’m still appalled,” she said dejectedly. “Here my part in the thing is done, but you’ve got to live with it for a long time yet while you do the notes and typing. I wish there was some way each book could be turned into print instantly, so that we could go on to the next one … I can’t help it — every time Seth finishes a book I feel like crying.”

(“And why not? It’s a perfectly natural reaction,” I said. But an interesting point came out as we talked: Jane doesn’t experience that strong nostalgia when she finishes one of her “own” books.

(Which was Seth’s way of leading us into other than book material. For a little while he discussed Jane’s Politics, our relationship with others through the mail and by telephone, and a different kind of “inner listening” that we’d become involved in. Then he wound up the evening’s work with a remark that I took to be a reference to my third question:)

I bid you then a fond good evening for now, from my unknown reality to yours. You can have all the books that you want, when you want them, and at your own pacing.

We finally rested from the sessions for most of July, although Jane continued working on her Psychic Politics, among other projects. Then, in the 752nd session for July 28, 1975, Seth plunged into his next book: The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression. He’s well into it at this writing, and as Jane and I have planned things, the notes for it will be very short. It should be published a few months after this present volume is issued.