“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Simply for the sake of analogy, imagine the image, a humanoid one, of an entity giant-sized, spread out anywhere in your physical universe. [...] On the other hand the entity’s consciousness can travel through these. [...]

It is as if you could consciously come to terms with each of your own cells and become aware, in your terms, of their future and their past. [...]

[...] But when you realize that your own body cells are much more than physical, contain their own capsule comprehension, then you will see that they could, at least theoretically, operate in such a manner if you could throw your own consciousness into them, and perceive their seemingly alien experience.

Now the moment points could also represent various personalities belonging to the entity, portions of its own consciousness that it sends upon the journeys of exploration and discovery. [...]

(9:36.) Your conscious mind is meant to assess and evaluate physical reality, and to help you chart your course in the corporeal universe of which you are presently part. [...] All energy at the inner self’s disposal is then concentrated to bring about the results asked for by the conscious mind.

He was a study, a living example, of the effects of conflicting unexamined beliefs, a fierce and yet agonized personification of what can happen when an individual allows his conscious mind to deny its responsibilities — i.e., when an individual becomes afraid of his own consciousness.

[...] This is not a usual case — but to some extent or another, such a division occurs physically or mentally when the contents of the conscious mind are not examined.

[...] The simple event of Ruburt reading Hoyle’s book: Ruburt began reading certain ideas with which he is not yet consciously familiar. [...] I am aware of his emotional ideas, of course, and to an important degree I am free of his prejudices, but more than that, in certain terms, my consciousness is not limited, so that I can take from Ruburt’s understanding his good comprehension of where science is, and then tell you where an enlightened science might go.

More important, I can tell you that atoms, for example, are primarily consciousness. [...] I can perceive your objects as objects, or not—but the true nature of reality must come from a study of consciousness.

(We had two questions for Seth, since we’re trying to get into the habit of writing such down as they occur to us: 1. Jane wanted Seth to comment on why he’ll take off on something she’s read, and reinterpret it his own way, or carry it further; her question came up because he did this Monday while she’s reading Fred Hoyle’s book, Ten Faces of The Universe; 2. Jane wanted Seth to give information on her “significant” dream of last Saturday morning, July 1. She couldn’t remember any details from it, but has talked about it often; she thinks it had something to do with health.)

[...] In many cases, however, the contact alone opens up different aspects of your own consciousness in response. [...]

(All with much emphasis and irony:) The idea of a meaningless universe, however, is in itself a highly creative imaginative act. [...] Indeed, then, the theory actually says that the ordered universe magically emerged — and evolutionists must certainly believe in a God of Chance somewhere, or in Coincidence with a capital C, for their theories would make no sense at all otherwise.

[...] You view the entire universe in a fashion that did not exist before, so that imagination and belief intangibly structure your subjective experience and your objective circumstances.

[...] There might be many gods or one, but there was a meaning in the universe. [...]

[...] They will see the world in black-and-white terms again, with good and evil clearly delineated in the most simplistic terms, and thus escape a slippery, thematic universe, in which man’s feelings seemed to give him no foothold at all.

(9:50.) Usually when you do examine your conscious mind you do so looking through, or with, your own structured beliefs. The knowledge that your beliefs are not necessarily reality will allow you to be aware of all the data that is consciously available to you. I am not telling you to examine your thoughts so frequently and with such vigor that you get in your own way, but you are not fully conscious unless you are aware of the contents of your conscious mind. I am also emphasizing the fact that the conscious mind is equipped to receive information from the inner self as well as the exterior universe.

[...] In so doing you never think of looking for it in the conscious mind, since you are convinced that all deep answers lie far beneath — and, moreover, that your consciousness is not only unable to help you but will often send up camouflages instead. [...]

I quite realize that many of my statements will contradict the beliefs of those of you who accept the idea that the conscious mind is relatively powerless, and that the answers to problems lie hidden beneath.

Obviously the conscious mind is a phenomenon, not a thing. [...]

So far in our discussion, then, we have an inner self, dwelling primarily in a mental or psychic dimension, dreaming itself into physical form, and finally forming a body consciousness. To that body consciousness the inner self gives “its own body of physical knowledge,” the vast reservoir of physical achievement that it has triumphantly produced. (Pause.) The body consciousness is not “unconscious,” but for working purposes in your terms, [the body] possesses its own system of consciousness that to some extent, now (underlined), is separated from what you think of as your own normal consciousness. The body’s consciousness is hardly to be considered less than your own, or as inferior to that of your inner self, since it represents knowledge from the inner self, and is a part of the inner self’s own consciousness—the part delegated to the body.

(Long pause.) In one way or another, that inner information had to connect each consciousness on the face of the planet. Earthly creatures must be able to react in a moment, yet the inner mechanisms that made such reactions possible were based upon calculations that could not be consciously kept in mind. In your time scheme, for example, you could never move as quickly as you do if you had to consciously work all the muscles involved in motion—or in speech, or in any such bodily performance. You certainly could not communicate on such a physical level if you first had to be aware of all of speech’s mechanisms, working them consciously before a word was uttered. Yet you had to have that kind of knowledge, and you had to have it in a way that did not intrude upon your conscious thoughts.

[...] The inner self still related to dream reality, while the body’s orientation and the body consciousness attained, as was intended, a great sense of physical adventure, curiosity, speculation, wonder—and so once again the inner self put a portion of its consciousness in a different parcel, so to speak. As once it had formed the body consciousness, now it formed a physically attuned consciousness, a self whose desires and intents would be oriented in a way that, alone, the inner self could not be.

[...] To one extent or another, these three systems of consciousness operate in one way or another in all of the species, and in all particles, in the physical universe. [...]

(It is a universal truth that whatever you impress on your subconscious mind is expressed on the screen of space as condition, experience and event. [...]

[...] Whatever your conscious mind assumes and believes to be true, your subconscious mind will accept and bring to pass. [...]

[...] There are built-in guidelines so that the body consciousness itself, while mirroring your negative images at times, will also automatically struggle against them.

[...] Physically speaking at least, thoughts are chemically propelled, and they travel through the universal body as viruses travel through your temporal form.

[...] All portions of the body’s reality are versions in flesh of the soul’s reality, even as all segments of the exterior universe mirror an internal one. [...]

[...] The waking consciousness, dear friends, is not the ego. The ego is merely a small portion of waking consciousness. The ego is the portion of waking consciousness that deals with physical manipulation.

[...] The dream state itself is a very loose term, for there are several layers of consciousness within it, and there is no limit to the states of consciousness that can be achieved, ideally speaking.

[...] These realities within the dream universe may be created by you, but they are as actual as the piece of cake that you eat, or the poison that you may swallow. As your common sense protects you in the physical universe, so you must use discretion as you progress into the manipulation of dream objects.

[...] You have both occasionally learned to take our waking consciousness into the dream state, and here Fox is correct, for you must start at this point.

[...] For my own amusement, in recent years I’ve often tried to objectify that statement by equating the possible number of probable realities with the current scientific estimate of the number of atoms in the universe: 10⁷⁹, or a 1 followed by 79 zeroes. But even if that rather simple number is inconceivable to us it still won’t do, of course, for it represents only a limit of measurement inside the “physical” universe we think we know. Within the limitless realms of consciousness, 10⁷⁹ is still but a doorway to vastly greater imaginative quantities and qualities of either numbers or probable realities. [...]

[...] Given our present ideas about the limitless nature of consciousness, we think our joint quest has been underway since before our births—by choice—and we expect it to continue for the rest of our physical lives. [...] To me, redemption means a continuous search or journey, then, involving whatever events and interchanges we choose to create, for whatever purposes, along the way—and truly, I think, some of those purposes will involve things “the conscious mind may not be able presently to perceive.” [...]

Accounts of projecting into distant future lives seem rare: Perhaps the conscious self deeply hesitates at swimming in such uncharted pools of consciousness, even though present and future relationships are assumed.

[...] It could well be that her psyche has derived from her whole self, or entity, the “facts” of reality a lot better than either of us consciously knows them. [...] Our independence relative to reincarnation may represent just conscious cussedness on our parts, but we believe that each of us (meaning anyone, that is) always has the freedom to accept or reject any such choice or causality —whatever we choose to do. No, instead we think of our current challenges as contributing to the knowledge of our whole selves in most specific ways, rather than our being swayed that much by our reincarnational and/or counterpart associations. [...]

Antimatter exists in your own universe. [...] Antimatter, using your terms, exists simultaneously with your universe, having what I will call antigravity, and in what I will call anti-space.

[...] I am going to skip a giant step, and say that man himself and all conscious beings produce matter subconsciously.

If you will now remember that there are negative intervals, or intervals between the pulsations of energy into matter, if you will remember that your physical universe then is nonexistent for the same number of intervals that it is existent, then you will see that this gives us our antimatter.

[...] Such identities represent the combined organizations of consciousness of land, man, and animal, within any given realm. Simply enough put, there are as many kinds of consciousnesses as there are particles, and these are combined in infinite fashions. (Long pause.) In the dream state some of that experience, otherwise closed to you, forms the background of the dream drama (A one-minute pause.) Your consciousness is not one thing like a flashlight, that you possess. It is instead a literally endless conglomeration of points of consciousness, swarming together to form your validity — stamped, as it were, with your identity.

Using an analogy, its “particles” could be dispersed throughout the universe, with galaxies between, yet the identity would be retained. So unknowingly, now, portions of your consciousness mix and merge with those of other species without jarring your own sense of individuality one whit — yet forming other psychological realities upon which you do not concentrate.

[...] Your particular kind of consciousness is the result of specialized focus within a particular area. [...] It is, instead, a certain kind of organization that is indeed inviolate even while it is itself a portion of other kinds of consciousnesses, with their own points of focus. Your body itself is composed of self-aware organizations of consciousness that escape your notice and deal with perceptual material utterly alien to your own ways.

[...] Data gained through waking learning endeavor and experience are checked in dreaming, not only against physical experience, but are also processed according to those “biological” and “spiritual” data, colon: Again, that information is acquired as the sleeping consciousness disperses itself, in a manner of speaking, and merges with other consciousnesses of its own and other species while still retaining its overall identity. These [other consciousnesses] are dispersed in like manner.

At first, in your terms, all of probable reality existed as nebulous dreams within consciousness of All That Is. [...] The dreams became recognizable one from the other, until they drew the conscious notice of All That Is. [...]

In his massive imagination, he understood the cosmic multiplication of consciousness that could not occur within that framework. [...] He saw then an infinity of probable, conscious individuals, and foresaw all possible developments, but they were locked within him unless he found the means.

[...] He gave consciousness and imagination to individuals while they still were but within his dreams. [...]

Potential individuals in your terms therefore had consciousness before the beginning, or any beginning, as you know it. [...]

The full personality consciousness indeed places an additional strain upon what you may call the overall body consciousness, and prolongs the sense of pain connected with that body consciousness. [...] In a terminal illness, the personality consciousness, the I as you know it, bears down in panic upon the body consciousness when it does not understand the state of affairs.

Consciousness ejects signals, the consciousness within the cell, not the cell, you see. Now the consciousness is within the cell, all through the cell, not localized within it, and yet it is not the matter of the cell.

He does not as yet consciously know the extent of his changed attitude. [...] You and Ruburt both know subconsciously, and you have begun to sense the implications on a conscious level, but barely. [...]

In one of our earliest sessions I told you that trees have consciousness, and that consciousness resided within all things, as the plants within this room to some extent are aware of you, and the happenings here, can sense strangers, and can strongly sense emotional and psychic atmospheres, to which they do indeed react. [...]

[...] Don’t be so anxious to throw your individuality back into their faces, saying, ‘I’m sick to death of myself and of my individuality; it burdens me.’ Even one squirrel’s consciousness, suddenly thrown into the body of another of its kind, would feel a sense of loss, encounter a strangeness, and know in the sacredness of its being that something was wrong. [...] Through honoring yourself, you honor whatever it is God is, and become a conscious co-creator.”

Certainly the species must be putting its conscious activities to long-term use, however, even with the endless conflicts and questions that grow out of such behavior. During the many centuries of our remembered history, those conflicts in themselves have been — and are — surely serving at least one of consciousness’s overall purposes, within our limits of understanding: to know itself more fully in those particular, differentiated ways.

[...] I added that even though we have no interest in putting down other approaches to inner reality, still we’re firm believers in the “inviolate nature of the individual consciousness, before, during, and after physical existence, in ordinary terms.”¹ So, here, we leave it up to the reader to make the intuitive and overt connections between Seth’s philosophy and the material Jane wrote today. [...]

[...] They bask in a sort of universal steam bath that drives all impurities of individuality or creativity from their souls, leaving them immersed, supposedly forever, in a bliss beyond description; in which, indeed, their own experience disappears.

When you consider that behind all matter there is a conscious energy, then you will see where the pattern comes from. [...] No physical nerve structure, or combination of purely chemical and material properties, will ever result in consciousness. The consciousness gives meaning to the physical material.

We have much yet to cover about various topics only lightly touched upon so far, including the nature of matter, the process involved in its continual creation and manipulation, and the truly astounding cooperation involved, as all living things contribute their energy to keep the physical universe in any kind of permanent, coherent form.

This process is carried out unconsciously, and yet if mankind follows through then he will become consciously aware of his own part in this continual creation of matter, and he will be able to continue in a much more intelligent manner.

Matter is in some ways the basis of your universe, and yet matter itself is merely energy changed into aspects with certain properties that can, under certain conditions, be perceived by your senses, and that can therefore be manipulated.

[...] Again in Seth Speaks, see Seth’s material at 10:07 in the 539th session for Chapter 10: “You may perfect [that past life], in other words, but you cannot again enter into that frame of reference as a completely participating consciousness — following — say, the historic trends of the time, joining into the mass-hallucinated existence that resulted from the applied consciousness of your self and your ‘contemporaries.’”

In the 82nd session for August 27, 1964: “When man realizes that he himself creates his personal and universal environment in concrete terms, then he can begin to create a private and universal environment much superior to the one that is the result of haphazard and unenlightened constructions.

[...] So your own consciousness follows a certain line of development that is its own, and that recognizes its own “seasons.” [...]

[...] The other two were points 4 and 5, as listed in the notes preceding this session; since Jane became consciously aware of material on them just before the session began, she’d had no time in which to give it. [...]

[...] In your dreams and particularly beyond those dreams that you recall, are areas of consciousness in which these sounds are automatically perceived and translated into visual images. [...] Given certain sounds, you could recreate your universe as you know it unconsciously, and any one multidimensional symbol can contain all the reality that you know. [...]

[...] Often, however, they represent the characteristics shown by consciousness when it is somewhat turned away from physical stimuli. The form of symbols is changed as the states of consciousness change.

To some extent this transmutation of symbol can be observed in various stages of waking consciousness also. [...]

(9:57.) Through the use of symbols, however, your feelings would be given full play, each image rising and falling in flow with feelings so far underneath consciousness — pools of emotion — that you were not aware of them. [...]

The so-called stream of consciousness is simply that — one small stream of thoughts, images, and impressions — that is part of a much deeper river of consciousness that represents your own far greater existence and experience. [...] Simultaneously these other streams of perception and consciousness go by without your notice, yet they are very much a part of you, and they represent quite valid aspects, events, actions, emotions with which you are also involved in other layers of reality.

“You” are not divorced from these other streams of consciousness in any basic way; only your focus of attention closes you off from them, and from the events in which they are involved. If you think of your stream of consciousness as transparent, however, then you can learn to look through and beneath it to others that lie in other beds of reality. You can also learn to rise above your present stream of consciousness and perceive others that run, for analogy’s sake, parallel. [...]

[...] Now, as you are merely concerned with your physical body and physical self as a rule, you give your attention to the stream of consciousness that seems to deal with it. These other streams of consciousness, however, are connected with other self-forms that you do not perceive. [...]

Any creative work involves you in a cooperative process in which you learn to dip into these other streams of consciousness, and come up with a perception that has far more dimensions than one arising from the one narrow, usual stream of consciousness that you know. [...]

As her psychic abilities began to rapidly grow, following her initiation of the Seth material late in 1963, Jane couldn’t help but become more and more concerned about consciously enlarging her “scope of identity.” [...]

Ever since she began studying Jane’s work fourteen years ago, my companion, Laurel Lee Davies, has been very conscious of the conflict between the rationalistic dominance so common in our culture, and the potential for greater development that she sensed within herself. [...]

[...] In some ways the Seth material has been given credit by the establishment; being taught as university course work, for example. [...]