“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)

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 … 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.

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.

(For the moment, though, we ate cookies and indulged in small talk. I could see that Jane was not only sad that the long project was finished for her, but uneasy, too; she was suddenly set loose, released from a framework that had come to be very familiar over the last 14½ months. Not that her new freedom hadn’t been expected. But she’s so creative that as soon as she is through with one undertaking she’s ready to launch into another; and this applies even though she’s been working on Psychic Politics outside of the Seth framework. That’s her focus in life [and mine, too]: the full commitment to artistic production. I’d often heard her comment about being in a kind of limbo between works. Her abilities demand use and release.

(“1. What do you think about this work being published in two volumes?

(“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?”

(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:)

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.)

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.