“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday Jane received from her publisher the galley proofs for her book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time.¹ The story of that work’s creation is interwound throughout Personal Reality.

(I read to Jane again the three questions I’d noted down for Seth during break in Monday’s session. As I suspected he might do, Seth began this evening’s session by dealing with the second one. Not all of his material tonight is given over to questions, however; much of the rest of it, covering matters other than those relating to “Unknown” Reality, is deleted.)

(Pause at 10:05. Now Seth took off into some areas involving Jane that were more personal; at the same time he gave material on the third and then the first of the questions I’d listed during break for the last session. I thought I’d include a few quotations from him on both issues, while eliminating portions of the session that deal with other matters entirely. I think the information on Jane is quite relevant to both her work and her life in general.)

3. Following Seth’s material in these paragraphs, then, there are of course a number of other Janes and Robs busily living out their lives in a cluster of associated probable realities — and all of those Janes and Robs are just as real to Seth as we are. I’ve had the thought before. It’s a somewhat chastening one, I said to Jane, joking, since it means that from Seth’s viewpoint we could be just two more individuals.

All sorts of interesting questions arise. Perhaps Seth likes some of those other versions of ourselves more than he does us. ( I didn’t ask him if I was right, though.) It might even be that his favorite Jane inhabits one probable reality, his favorite Rob another. How does Seth tell all of us apart? What age differences are there among us? In which reality did we produce the “best” version of “Unknown” Reality? The worst? Moreover — what do all of those other Janes and Robs think of their Seths? And so on….

4. Jane describes in Chapter 1 of Politics the onset of her ability to perceive her psychic library. For library material in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, see the notes at the start of Session 714, and Seth’s dictation for Session 715.

5. Jane has yet to see Seth’s apparition, however, or to meet him in her library or any other “out-of-the-way place.” In Note 2 for Appendix 11, in Volume 1, I refer to the time she set out to “find” Seth.

6. Seth spoke of “strands of reality” here, we think, because today Jane had been going over her material on the stages of consciousness and strands of consciousness for chapters 24 and 25, respectively, of Politics.

7. In Session 594 for the Appendix of Seth Speaks, see Sue’s material on how she sensed Jane’s and Seth’s “speeds” — as well as her own.

8. Appendix 18 for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality contains much material “on the complex relationships involving Jane-Ruburt-Seth [and also Rob-Joseph].” Jane devoted Chapter 15 of Adventures to a discussion of the inner order of events and “unofficial” perceptions.

9. Material on the psychic and physical challenges that Jane chose to deal with in this life can be found in sessions 708 and 713 (among others). In the former, see Seth’s delivery after 11:40, as well as the notes at the end of the session; in the latter, see the opening notes, and Seth’s discussion after 11:26.

13. During the 10:36 break for Session 740, which was held a couple of months ago, I wrote that the list of house connections associated with our move to the hill house had grown to over 40 items, “and continues to grow.” Jane and I have now accumulated more than 60 such interrelationships, and they range all the way from color and architectural similarities among the various houses we’ve either lived in, or felt strong emotional and psychic attachments for, to human connections like the following one. It’s neither the most inconsequential item on our list, or the most spectacular — but recently we learned through a close relative of the Steffans (I’ll call them), the couple from whom we bought the hill house, that at a small social gathering over two years ago Jane had spontaneously given something of a psychic “reading” for Mrs. Steffans. Moreover, this event had taken place in the apartment house we lived in on Water Street; not in our own quarters there, however, but in the apartment of another tenant whom we’ve known for a number of years.

Jane hadn’t met Mrs. Steffans before, and never saw her again. (I wasn’t involved in the little scenario.) The Steffanses moved out of Elmira some months before we purchased the hill house through a real estate agency.

Stranger still, that reading marked one of the few times — and certainly the last, to the best of our mutual recollection — that Jane has “tuned in to” an individual under such circumstances. “I just did it because I liked her after we got talking,” Jane said, once the Steffanses’ relative had reminded her of the affair. “But I don’t think I precognitively picked up that we were going to buy their house two years later, or anything like that. We didn’t know this place [the hill house] even existed then. Hell, we didn’t even know the street existed.”

Let me note at the end of this account that the mutual friend who introduced Jane and Mrs. Steffans has participated in some of our other house connections also — a function similar to the one enacted by our new acquaintance, Frank Corio, whom I referred to in Note 11 for Session 740. Jane and I saw this kind of situation develop with several other individuals also, once we began our active house hunting in Sayre, Pennsylvania, in April 1974.

14. This final note is added well over a year after Jane finished delivering “Unknown” Reality. As I wrote at the start of the 740th session, Jane suspended ESP class on February 26, 1975, to give us time to not only prepare for our move to the hill house (in March), but to settle down afterward.

As might be expected, the class hiatus soon began to have a ripple effect: The longer we delayed making up our minds as to whether we’d have the time to resume class, the more Jane’s students began to scatter. The younger people, especially those who weren’t natives of the area to begin with, began to fan out across the nation, and even into foreign lands, continuously searching for more of that indefinable essence or quality many of them called “truth.” They took Seth’s ideas with them, however, and with considerable interest Jane and I thought of them as not only looking for truths but meeting counterparts. Why not, indeed? According to Seth’s views, such encounters with other portions of their whole selves would be inevitable.

We also applied the counterpart ideas to ourselves. Seth named a number of counterparts among class members in the 732nd session — including, for example, a total of nine involving Jane and me (counting the psychic relationships between us) — and I wrote about those connections in Appendix 25 for that session.

As class gradually receded into the past, through our own default, as it were, Jane and I kept in touch with some of our local counterparts from class, while we saw less and less of certain others. Each choice seemed to be a matter of mutual, unspoken agreement among all concerned, and we kept in mind that each individual had the complete freedom to do as he or she wished about maintaining contact with us — just as we had in our relationships with them.

Of my three class counterparts other than Jane, then, it developed that Norma Pryor and Jack Pierce soon embarked upon their own paths, which hardly ever cross mine even though we don’t live that far apart. Peter Smith and I still see each other often. On Jane’s part, one of her counterparts, Zelda, has traveled far away, although maintaining a tenuous, infrequent contact by mail. Jane has met Alan Koch but twice physically, yet feels allied with him. Sue Watkins remains close (to both of us, by the way), even though she now lives in a small community that’s well over an hour’s travel north of Elmira. And Jane has seen her fourth counterpart, “the young man from Pennsylvania …” but once since class stopped meeting.

The longer we went without class, the more Jane and I saw how much its demise paralleled the ending of “Unknown” Reality. Both events were inevitable, we came to understand; both had had their time; our regrets about the finishing of both are real, while simultaneously we heartily agree that the nature of life in this physical — or “camouflage” — reality is one of unending change and renewal. Even though we may never again see many of those counterparts we’d known, we realize that all of us are indissolubly joined. Nor is the fact that a number of us are physically separated (or invisible to each of the others) of great importance, for as Seth told us recently in a private session: