“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

1. Jane rather surprised me: I knew she had an interested if generalized awareness of the old theory of the ether (or the luminiferous ether), but I hadn’t realized she was well-enough acquainted with the idea to be able to verbalize it that succinctly for Seth. In several texts I have, the authors wrote about the ether, and Jane may have read those passages. I may have discussed the theory with her, but I don’t remember doing so.

The idea of the ether, or something like it, had been around since the time of the ancient Greeks. By the last decades of the 19th century, and in line with Newtonian physics, the ether was postulated as an invisible, tasteless, odorless substance that pervaded all unoccupied space, and served as the medium for the passage of electromagnetic waves of light and other kinds of radiant energy, like heat — just as the earth itself serves as the medium for the transmission of seismic waves, for instance.

Once scientists theorized the ether as the medium in which the physical universe existed.¹ Framework 2 is the psychological medium in which the consciousness of the world exists. The word “ego” is much bandied about, and in many circles it has a poor reputation. It is, however, as I use it, a term meant to express the ordinarily conscious directive portion of the self. It is your conscious version of what you are — an excellent description, if I do say so myself (with amusement). It is directed outward into the physical world. It is also aware, however, of some of your “unconscious” activities. It is the you you identify with, so it is as aware of your dreams, for example, as you are, and it is quite conscious of the fact that its existence rests upon knowledge that it does not itself possess.

Late in the last century some very ingenious experiments failed to scientifically prove the existence of the ether, however, and the theory was finally dispensed with for good following Albert Einstein’s publication of his special theory of relativity in 1905.

[...] Her feelings for these works of science, then, are the same as those she has for the ether; see Note 1 for Session 822.

[...] He is shrewd; in his manner more earthy than ethereal. [...]