“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] It was indeed a dreamlike world, but a highly charming and vital one, in which dreaming imaginations played rambunctiously with all the probabilities entailed in this new venture: imagining the various forms of language and communication possible, spinning great dream tales of future civilizations replete with their own built-in histories—building, because they were now allied with time, mental edifices that automatically created pasts as well as futures.

These ancient dreams were shared to some extent by each consciousness that was embarked upon the earthly venture, so that creatures and environment together formed great environmental realities. [...]

[...] Each individual of whatever species, and each consciousness, whatever its degree, automatically seeks to enhance the quality of life itself—not only for itself but for all of reality as well.

“Now: It is easy to live—so easy that although you live, rest, create, respond, feel, touch, see, sleep, and wake, you do not really have to try to do any of those things. [...]

The first Seth excerpt is in keeping with the idea of creating bridges between the two volumes of “Unknown” Reality by lifting something out of one for inclusion in the other. Once more from the 743rd session in Volume 2: “No book entitled The “Unknown” Reality can hope to make that reality entirely known. [...]

[...] We go along in our own stubborn ways, knowing that our outlooks are rooted in the Western traditions of the world, but also knowing that there exist all about us these numerous other philosophies or systems, some of them many centuries old, that the human race has created to help it explain reality. [...] Why should nature punish anyone if it doesn’t punish anything? The realities of nirvana and karma are not ones that Jane and I want to create.

Here’s Seth from the 750th session, held on June 25, 1975, two months after he finished Volume 2. In it he not only sums up his motives in producing “Unknown” Reality, but comments on another one of his basic ideas that I think it important to stress every so often; this time, perception is involved. “The ‘Unknown’ Reality was written to give … individuals glimpses into alternate patterns of reality. [...]

“The ‘Unknown’ Reality itself is a product of the unknown reality of the mind, of course, since I produced it entirely in a trance state, as Seth. In a way the two volumes are the products of an inner psychic ‘combustion’ — the spark that is lit in our world, as Seth’s reality strikes mine — or vice versa. [...]

[...] How many of you would want to limit your reality, your entire reality, to the experience you now know? [...]

Now, in the three-dimensional reality in which your ego has its main focus, becoming presupposes arrival, or a destination — an ending to that which has been in a state of becoming. [...]

[...] In its intense focus in physical reality, however, it pretends not to know, until it feels able to utilize the information in physical terms.

[...] The ego prefers to consider itself the captain at the helm, so to speak, since it is the ego who most directly deals with the sometimes tumultuous seas of physical reality, and it does not want to be distracted from this task.

[...] Here, I wish to make it clear that [“Unknown” Reality] will initiate a journey in which it may seem that the familiar is left far behind. Yet when I am finished, I hope you will discover that the known reality is even more precious, more ‘real,’ because you will find it illuminated both within and without by the rich fabric of an ‘unknown’ reality now seen emerging from the most intimate portions of daily life…. [...] Your psychologies do not explain your own reality to you. [...] Your religions do not explain your greater reality, and your sciences leave you just as ignorant about the nature of the universe in which you dwell.

This present book, Volume 2, goes on from there as Seth creates an intriguing thematic framework, and then invites us to “play along,” to join in and to discover the unknown reality for ourselves through a series of exercises geared to illuminate the inner structures upon which our exterior ones depend.

“In Seth Speaks I tried to describe certain extensions of your own reality in terms that my readers could understand. In The Nature of Personal Reality, I tried to extend the boundaries of individual existence as it is usually experienced … to give the reader hints that would increase practical, spiritual and physical enjoyment and fulfillment in daily life. [...] In ‘Unknown’ Reality I went further, showing how the experiences of the psyche splash outward into the daylight, so to speak. [...] ‘Unknown’ Reality required much more work on Joseph’s part, and that additional effort in itself was a demonstration that the psyche’s events are very difficult to pin down in time. [...]

[...] (See Seth’s material on “ideals set in the heart of man” in sessions 696–97 for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality.) Apropos of such concepts, I’ll close these introductory notes by quoting from a personal session Seth gave for Jane and me, in which he reiterates the importance of the individual and the pursuit of the ideal. Seth initiated the following passages by talking to me about “the safe universe” that each person can create, and live within. [...]

[...] The great — the greatest creative force — that force that is the origin for all physical life — did not suddenly appear once in some distant past, sparking the birth of your reality, endowing it with an energy that could only then run down, or dissipate. Instead, ever-new virgin energy, so to speak, is created constantly, and appears at every conceivable point within your universal system.

As you know, you create or construct all physical matter. [...] All thoughts are composed of energy, and from our discussions you realize that there are electrical intensities within whose range all reality exists.

Every thought therefore has this kind of reality, which is the only reality, basically speaking. (Long pause.) Sense data itself has a reality independent of any given object. [...]

Reality changes its form in order to become known to itself. [...] Each consciousness then perceives reality in a different fashion. [...] But the mental or psychic energy behind all this is the one basic reality.

[...] The idea of mental image has its own reality, and is charged with energy, and this energy can never be withdrawn. [...]

[...] I’ll describe the latest of the many courses of action we’ve found ourselves considering over the years as we work with the Seth material, while trying to keep a balance between the realities we’ve created for ourselves and the possibilities we constantly encounter in the “outside” world.

(The challenges — and fears — created at Three Mile Island will last for years, however. [...]

[...] This year alone, for instance, he’s already given a good amount of excellent information upon a number of nonbook topics — among them the interpretation of dreams; human, animal, and plant consciousness, and the interactions among them; human sexuality; viruses and inoculation; other realities he himself inhabits, and so forth. [...]

The Jonestown and Harrisburg incidents are indeed classic examples of the meeting places between private and public realities. [...]

[...] But this computer is so highly endowed with creativity that each of the various personalities it programs spring into consciousness and song, and in turn create realities that may have been undreamed of by the computer itself.

Each personality has within it the ability not only to gain a new type of existence in the environment — in your case in physical reality — but to add creatively to the very quality of its own consciousness, and in so doing to work its way through the specialized system, breaking the barriers of reality as it knows it.

I must explain this before I can clearly give you an idea of my environment, or of those other systems of reality in which I operate. [...] In a very real way of speaking, your concept of reality as seen through your physical senses, scientific instruments, or arrived at through deduction, bears little resemblance to the facts — and the facts are difficult to explain.

Root assumptions are those built-in ideas of reality of which I spoke — those agreements upon which you base your ideas of existence. [...] Each system of reality has its own set of such agreements. [...]

There is the Mark which Mark has created, an actual physical construction. There is another Mark does not see, and this Mark is an actual physical construction created by you. There are at this time still two more physical Marks, one created by Ruburt, and one created by your cat.

[...] The three of you each create your own glass. You each create your own glass in your own personal perspective. [...]

(We were discussing the evening’s material when I happened to remark that it seemed as though a performer on television, for example, when viewed by others, might be created by millions of viewers, many of whom would be independent of each other as far as our conception of distance is concerned; yet all the images so created would overlap enough to be identifiable as the one performer.

[...] But each individual creates his own space continuum.

[...] I identify first of all with the emotional realities, for these are the only basic realities to me. [...]

I mentioned that objects are symbols to express a basic reality, the reality of direct experience. [...]

The physical body as an object is, among other things, a symbolic representation of your own emotional reality. [...] While they are all amazingly different, the basic symbol within your system is universally accepted as a reality.

[...] It is as valid a reality. [...]

They serve to mask other quite valid realities that exist at the same time, however, and actually from these other realities you gain the power and the knowledge to operate the material projections. You can “set the machine on idle,” so to speak, stop the apparent motion, and turn your attention to these realities.

[...] They are not deceived by the images that you project in three-dimensional reality. [...]

[...] Mankind has had various conceptions of his own reality but he has purposely, it seems, turned away from it in the last century. [...]

While you go about your daily chores and endeavors, beneath normal waking consciousness you are constantly focused in other realities also, reacting to stimuli of which your physical conscious self is not aware, perceiving conditions through the inner senses, and experiencing events that are not even registered within the physical brain. [...]

[...] Before him he saw a wall of books, and the self in the living room suddenly knew that his purpose here in this reality was to re-create some of those books. [...] The unknown and the known realities merged, clicked in, and were seen as the opposite sides of each other.

For myself, I think of reincarnational selves as having their roots in the physical reality we know (whether in simultaneous or linear terms of time), but of probable selves as having much wider and more complicated ranges of existence: I believe that even though we create them on an individual basis, our probable selves can reach into a multitude of other realities, both physical and nonphysical. [...]

The development freed Ruburt from many old limitations, and allowed him to at last have practical experience with the unknown reality in intimate terms. [...] Reality is above all practical, so when you expand your concepts concerning the nature of reality, you are apt then to find yourselves scandalized, appalled, or simply disoriented. [...]

But although for Politics Jane drew upon the same transcendent experience I described in the opening notes for the 715th session, she did so in her own subjective way; in “Unknown” Reality I present my version of the event from an observer’s viewpoint. [...] I think they’re both well worth having on record, since Jane’s experience was a profound one — and, in my opinion, very revealing for what it tells us about how we ordinarily view our mundane physical reality, and about the much more powerful versions, or “models,” for that reality that exist behind it.

[...] Yet the conflict that developed between her writing self and her mystical self, as explained by Seth in Personal Reality, was only one facet of her intuitive drive toward that expression: As Jane matured, she realized that there were other challenges for her to contend with too. Among them were the resolution of some old family relationships — and nowhere in this note am I talking about past lives or probable lives, but just the working out of hard questions rooted in this present physical reality. [...] She fully accepts the idea that she creates her own reality.

[...] Since I believe that each of us creates our own reality in the most precise terms, it can hardly be a coincidence that at this time of decision my friend introduced Jane and me — for she was just as devoted to writing as I was to painting.

[...] Six months before starting “Unknown” Reality, however, he made a few remarks that I’ve applied ever since to life in our physical reality: “Each person chooses his or her parents, accepting in terms of environment and heredity a bank of characteristics, attitudes, and abilities from which to draw in physical life. There is always a reason, and so each parent will represent to each child an unspeakable symbol, and often the two parents will represent glaring contrasts and different probabilities, so that the child can compare and contrast divergent realities … Your two brothers also chose the family situation. [...]

[...] Jane had begun delivering the Seth material late in 1963, and soon afterwards Seth started developing his ideas on probabilities.¹ Many times while looking at the snapshots since then I’d found myself speculating about the probable realities surrounding their two young subjects. [...] By now, did those photographs actually depict the immature images of us, the Jane and Rob we knew and had always been, or from our standpoint did they show a probable Jane, a probable Rob — two individuals who long ago had set out upon their own journeys through other realities? [...]

[...] Here you will find, undistorted, uncamouflaged, the innate knowledge of the creation of the camouflage universe, the mechanics involved, much of the material that I have given you, the method and ways by which the inner self as a basic inhabitant of the inner universe, existing in the climate of psychological reality, helps create the various planes of existence, constructs outer senses to project and perceive the various apparent realities or camouflages, how the inner self reincarnates on the various planes. Here you will find your answers as to how the inner self transforms energy for his own purposes, changes his form, adopts other apparent realities, and all this free for the investigation.

[...] As long as you keep the pattern in mind, you create it, and it is there. [...] Your camouflage and your world is created by conscious focusing and unconscious concentration. [...]

You must be more open and receptive than this in order to receive knowledge of undistorted basic realities. And the truly hilarious part of this is that such seemingly subjective data will enable you to cut through objective, or so-called objective, reality in a way that will give you so-called proofs, that you can achieve in no other fashion.

The value climate of psychological reality can be likened to an ocean in which all consciousness has its being. [...]

Birth is perhaps the most forceful aggression, in your terms, of which you are capable in your system of reality (emphatically). [...]

In your terms man is an animal, rising out of himself, from himself evolving certain animal capacities to their utmost; not forming new physical specializations of body any longer (again in your terms), but creating from his needs, desires and blessed natural aggressiveness inner structures having to do with values, space and time. [...]

Compassion “rose” from the biological structure up to emotional reality. [...]

[...] So you will collect an “unnatural” guilt, one that you do not deserve but accept and so create.

You will see that in the first mentioned examples the effect would be created by man in line with his abilities, and in the latter examples the effects would be created in some instances by what is sometimes called dead matter, but what we know as other forms of consciousness, according to their ability.

These psychological forms or structures have a reality and validity, composed of gestalts that exist in perspectives that you do not recognize.

Consciousness actually creates these perspectives, in which it can then manifest itself in form. [...]

The individual attempts to project these psychological structures into physical reality, where they will then be known, realized, manipulated, and to some extent mastered as matter.

[...] You must realize that you do create your own reality because of your beliefs about it. [...]

(Yesterday I received in the mail a copy of a long article that Sam Menahem, a psychologist in Fort Lee, New Jersey, has written for a summer issue of Reality Change. [...]

(Dee G. asked how one looks for reality inside oneself.)

If you look outward, then you see what you have created, all of you. [...]

[...] You have met many strangers lately, both in the dream state and in regular waking reality. [...]

[...] You must first recognize the fact honestly, that there are certain portions of your reality that you do not like. Do not pretend, be honest, and then you can change the reality. [...] In learning what you are you will discover what reality is, and again what the nature of God is. [...]

[...] You do quite literally form your own reality and there is no symbolism in that statement. If you do not like the reality that you are forming then you can change it, and honesty is extremely important in this regard. [...]

[...] Because their idea of reality is limited, why should you limit yours? [...] That is what you are doing when you limit your own idea of reality. [...]

[...] You each have a hand in the creation of reality as it is known. [...]

[...] The conscious art of creating, understanding, and using dreams has been largely lost; and the intimate relationship between daily life, world events, and dreams almost completely ignored. [...] The members of some ancient civilizations, including the Egyptians, knew how to be the conscious directors of dream activity, how to delve into various levels of dream reality to the founts of creativity, and they were able to use that source material in their physical world.²

[...] ⁴ No system of reality is closed. [...] In the waking state the conscious mind must focus rather exclusively upon that one particular point of concentration that you call reality, simply so that it can direct your activities properly in temporal life. It is quite equipped, however, also to direct you to some extent in other levels of reality when it is not needed for specific survival duties.

[...] I had two questions prepared, both growing out of material in “Unknown” Reality, but had to lay them aside until next time.)

Dictation: These blueprints for reality are relatively invisible because you have allowed yourselves to forget their existence.