“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The rockbed reality is the one in which the perceiver is focused. From that standpoint all others would seem peripheral. Taking that for granted, however, any given reality system will be surrounded by its probability clusters. These can almost be thought of as satellites. Time and space need not be connected, however — that is, the attractions that exist between a reality and any given probability cluster may have nothing to do with time and space at all. The closest probability satellite to any given reality may, for example, be in an entirely different universe altogether. (Pause.) In that regard, you may find brethren more or less like yourselves outside of your own universe — as you think of it — rather than inside it. You imagine your universe as extending outward in space (and backwards in time). You think of it as an exteriorized manifestation, expanding perhaps, but in an exterior rather than an interior fashion.¹

(Slowly:) Your idea of space travel, for example, is to journey over the “skin of your universe.” You do not understand that your system is indeed expanding within itself, bringing forth new creativity and energy (underlined).

Give us time … Your universe is only one of many. Each one creates probable versions of itself. When you journey on the earth you move around the outside of it. So far, your ideas of space travel involve that kind of surface navigation. Earth trips, however, are made with the recognition of their surface nature.² When you think in terms of traveling to other planets or to other galaxies, though, the same kind of surface travel is involved. As closely as I can explain it in your terms, your concepts of space travel have you going around space rather than directly through it.

In the same way, others can visit your planet with the same results. There is then a whole great inner dimension even to the space that you know, that you do not perceive. There are intelligent beings outside of your own galaxy, “adjacent” to you. Theoretically, you can visit them with some vast improvements in your technology, but great amounts of time would be involved. Others have visited your own planet in that particular fashion. Yours is still a linear technology. Some intelligent beings have visited your planet, finding not the world you know but a probable one.⁴ There are always feedbacks between probable systems. A dominant species in one may appear as a bizarre trace species in another. More will be said about this and your planet later in the book.⁵ The closest equivalent to your own kind of intelligence and being can actually be found not by following the outer skin of space, but by going through it, so to speak.

Give us time … There are, again, inner coordinates having to do with the inner behavior of electrons. If you understood these, then such travel could be relatively instantaneous. The coordinates that link you with others who are more or less of your kind have to do with psychic and psychological intersections that result in a like space-time framework.

Energy was almost instantly transmitted across the continent from one specific individual to another. When you are dealing with that kind of energy, and particularly when you believe in it, space does not matter. Emotional connections are set up and form their own set of coordinates. (Pause.) That beam of energy is as strong and real as a beam of steel, though it moves faster than a beam of light.

Now: In the same way you can be allied and in tune with other probabilities that do not coincide with your space-time axis. The exterior universe with its galaxies — as you understand it, and on that level of activity — can be encountered on certain rigid space-time coordinates. You can visit other planets only in your present (underlined). Your present may be the past or the future as far as inhabitants of a given planet are concerned. Your physical senses will only operate in their and your present.

“Effective” space travel, creative space travel on your part, will not occur until you learn that your space-time system is one focus. Otherwise you will seem to visit one dead world after another, blind to civilizations that may exist on any of them. Some of these difficulties could be transcended if you learned to understand the miraculous multidimensionality of even your own physical structure, and allowed your consciousness some of its greater freedom.

Theoretically, a thoroughly educated space traveler in your time, landing upon a strange planet, would be able to adjust his own consciousness so that he could perceive the planet in various “sequences” of time. If you land upon a planet in a spaceship and find volcanoes, you would, perhaps, realize that other portions of that planet might show different faces. You have confidence in your ability to move through space, so you might then explore the terrain that you could not see from your original landing point. If you did not understand the change in qualities of space, you might imagine that the whole planet was a giant volcano.

You do not understand as yet, however, that in a way you can move through time as you move through space — and until you understand that, you will not know the meaning of a true journey, or be able to thoroughly explore any planet — or any reality, including your own.

Certain strains were involved that in one way were as natural as growing pains. This has nothing to do with so-called psychic phenomena, but the natural growth and development of a personality whenever it tries to go beyond its space and time context, and takes on challenges of such a nature.

At the beginning of Appendix 12, see the longer presentation from the 44th session for Seth’s discussion of “the value climate of psychological reality” — the “medium” that spontaneously contains within it all of our camouflage constructions of space, time, growth, and durability. Note 2 for Appendix 12 also fits in here, especially Seth’s references within it to our endless questions about the beginning and ending of the physical universe.

From the 250th session for April 11, 1966: “The atom you ‘see’ does not grow larger in mass, or expand outward in your space, and neither does your universe.”

In scientific terms, it doesn’t seem likely that the conflict between the two views will ever be resolved, or any decision reached that our universe may be an oscillating one, forever contracting and expanding. There are too many variables in measurement and interpretation, including the difficulties the human mind encounters when it attempts to grasp the enormous spans of time and space involved.

3. Seth began discussing coordinate points in Chapter 5 of Seth Speaks. See the 524th session: “Other kinds of consciousness coexist within the same ‘space’ that your world inhabits. They do not perceive your physical objects, for their reality is composed of a different camouflage structure. This is a general statement, however, for various points of your realities can and do coincide … points of what you would call double reality, containing great energy potential … where realities merge.”

4. For one instance when Seth discussed our coming attempts at space travel, see Note 4 for Session 702, in Volume 1. Here’s part of the material I quoted from the 40th session: “It is very possible that you might end up in what you intend as a space venture only to discover that you have ‘traveled’ to another plane [probability]. But at first you will not know the difference.”

7. Of the books on astronomy that I’ve read (and I’m way short of scanning any great number of them, obviously), only one contains a brief mention of a similar notion in connection with space travel — that is, journeying almost instantaneously in a straight line between planets instead of following the relativistic curve of space. The volume’s learned author treats the idea as just an idea, however, and a pretty far-out one at that — while here Jane demonstrated her version of the same principle in a practical way. See Note 2 for Session 709.