“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane paused. She still habitually referred to “Unknown” Reality as a one-volume work — even as Seth himself did in the session this evening — despite the decision made 10 days ago to publish it in two volumes. “I feel sort of sorry,” she continued, “because here the sessions will stop again just after we got back into them. You’ll need time to finish the notes and do all that typing….”¹)

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.

Besides this, however, it contains what you may call cues that automatically open up greater levels of your own awareness, and hence bring into your conscious life some recognition of the unknown reality in which you also have your being. The subject matter itself entices your imagination. That intuitive faculty will then illuminate the intellect so that it learns to question in a broader, more exciting and productive manner than perhaps it did before.

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.

The “proper” questions about the unknown reality will automatically bring more of it into your experience.

You are the unknown reality, to the extent that you do not recognize, realize, or experience the many facets of your own being. As always, I say that the answers lie within yourself, not in the exterior world.

(10:09.) Clues may indeed be found there, however, because the exterior conditions mirror so perfectly your inner, individual and mass experience.

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.

Your ready answers end up limiting your own experience, because you try to fit your subjective behavior into the cramped boot of preconceived ideas. Your experience creates new questions in the same way that a painter creates new paintings.

(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.

Are your fingers tired?

(“No,” I said. At the same time, I was thinking as I wrote that Seth’s sentence, above: “You cannot understand perceived events unless you understand who perceives them,” embodied one of his best ideas in “Unknown” Reality.)

When I consider those (Atlantis, UFO’s, and so forth) and other such matters, it will be from a much different perspective. By then you — my readers — will be familiar enough with the unknown reality to understand answers given in a different context. Period.

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.

(Pause.) I am a part of your unknown reality, and you are a part of mine. To some extent in these pages our realities meet. To the extent that you do not know yourself, you do not know your world. To the extent that you do not know yourself, you do not know your husband, or wife, or mother and father. To the extent that you do not know yourself, you do not know what God is. To the extent that you do not know yourself, you do not know what nature is. The unknown reality exists to the extent that you do not travel joyfully through the intimate lands of the psyche, to the extent that you do not directly experience your life as original (forcefully), but accept labels put on it by others. The unknown reality exists as a challenge, an exciting endeavor, as each individual becomes consciously aware of intimate subjective feeling. Do not overlay the personal daily aspects of your life with preconceived ideas about who you are, what you are, where you are, why you are. Become aware of the original nature of any given moment as it exists for you.

(Pause.) Forget what you have been told about time and space. Refuse to accept ideas that limit the dimensions of your own natural being. Again, the unknown reality is what you are.

(“2. In our terms of time: What were some of your other activities, in other realities, while you were giving ‘Unknown’ Reality through Jane for well over a year?

(“3. I suppose it’s quite evident why you finished ‘Unknown’ Reality right after we moved into our ‘new’ house, but will you reassure Jane by commenting on this, and on future works?”

(“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.

Now: I will answer your questions on Wednesday. But I have a few remarks.

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.

(11:44 P.M. And so, even though Seth had declared the end of “Unknown” Reality this evening, it will still include at least part of the next session.)

1. A note added four months later: Jane needn’t have worried. The sessions didn’t come to a halt after all. With the arrival of warmer weather we did take an occasional break from psychic work, but for the most part the sessions were held regularly even though Seth was through with “Unknown” Reality. Some of them were private, but Seth also covered a number of interesting topics of a more general nature — material we’d like to see published eventually. (His comments in the 750th session as to why “Unknown” Reality was written, are quoted in the Introductory Notes for Volume 1.)