The "Unknown" Reality - Seth, Jane Roberts

How can my psyche exist in more than one time at once?

A young man was here last evening. He possesses great mastery of the guitar. As he played, it was obvious that any given composition "grew" from the first note, and had always been latent within it. An infinite number of other "alternative" compositions were also latent within the same note, however, but not played last night. They were quite as legitimate as compositions that were played. They were, in fact, inaudibly a part of each heard melody, and those unheard variations added silent structure and pacing to the physically actualized music.

Following this analogy, in the same way each psyche contains within it infinite notes, and each note is capable of its own endless creative variations. You follow one melody of yourself, and for some reason you seem to think that the true, full orchestra of yourself will somehow drown you out.

When I speak in terms of counterparts, then, or of reincarnational selves and probable selves, I am saying that in the true symphony of your being you are violins, oboes, cymbals, harps - in other words, you are living instrument through which you play yourself. You are not an instrument upon which you are played. You are the composer and the symphony. You play ballads, classical pieces, lyrics, operas. One creative performance does not contradict the others.

Some people structure their lives around their children, others around a career, or pleasure, or even pain. Again, these are simply certain focuses that you choose, that direct your experience. You can add other focuses while still retaining your own identity - indeed, enriching it.

To some degree you feel the same way when you encounter the concept of probable selves, or of counterparts. It is as though you had an unlimited bank of abilities and characteristics from which to draw, and yet were afraid of doing so - fearing that any addition could make you less instead of more. 

Now in music the pauses are as important as the sounds. In fact, they serve to highlight the sounds, to frame them. The sounds are significant because of their placement within the pauses or silences. So the portions of your psyche that you recognize as yourself are significant and intimate and real, because of the inner pauses or silences that are not actualized, but are a part of your greater being.

The creativity of the psyche means that no one world or experience could ever contain it. Therefore, does it create the dimensions in which it then has its experiences.

Each portion, by whatever name, contains within it the latent potentials of the whole. If the unknown reality exists, it is because you play one melody over and over and so identify yourself, while closing out, consciously at least, all of the other possible variations that you could add to that tune.

The particular variations that one person might play are endless. You cannot consciously begin to alter the framework of your life, however, unless you realize first of all that you form it. The melody is your own. It is not inevitable, nor is it the only tune that you can play. 

To some extent you can actualize portions of your own unknown reality, and draw them into the experienced area of your life.


You are the unknown reality, to the extent that you do not recognize, realize, or experience the many facets of your own being. As always, I say that the answers lie within yourself, not in the exterior world.

Do not overlay the personal daily aspects of your life with preconceived ideas about who you are, what you are, where you are, why you are. Become aware of the original nature of any given moment as it exists for you. 


Forget what you have been told about time and space. Refuse to accept ideas that limit the dimensions of your own natural being. Again, the unknown reality is what you are.

Technique:Probable Events..Probable Selves..Probable Existences..Multidimensional Self

Take any remembered scene from your own past. Experience it as clearly as possible imaginatively, but with the idea of its probable extensions. Sometime, immediately or after a few tries, a particular portion of the scene will become gray or shadowy. It is not a part of the past that you know, but an intersection point where that past served as an offshoot into a series of probabilities that you did not follow.

Instead of a shadowy element, you yourself may feel unsubstantial - 'ghostly,' as Ruburt did. Instead of any of those things, the imagined dialogue - if there is any - may suddenly change from the dialogue that you remember; or the entire scene and action may quickly alter. Any of these occurrences can be hints that you are beginning to glimpse the probable variations of the particular scene or action. It is, however, the subjective feeling that is the important clue here, and once you experience it there will be no doubt in your mind.

Some people will have little trouble with the exercise, and others will need to exert persistence before finding any success at all. This method is even more effective if you choose from your past a scene in which a choice was involved that was important to you.

In such a case, begin imaginatively, following through with the other decision or decisions that you might have made. At one point a shadowy effect - grayness, or other characteristics just mentioned - will occur. One or several of these may be involved, but again your subjective feeling is the most important clue. Imagination may bring you a clear picture, for example, that may then become fuzzy, and in that case the blurred quality would be your hint of probable action.

Until you have tried the exercise and become fully acquainted with it, you will not understand its effectiveness. You will know, for instance, when the remembered event and imagination intersect with another probability. Whether or not you have any great success, the exercise will begin a neurological reorientation that will be most important if you hope to glimpse realities that are outside of your present neurologically accepted sense-reality.

This exercise is a mental and biological doorway that can expand both your concepts of yourself and reality.

There may be instances in which it seems that little progress is made during the exercise itself. During the day, however, having made an important decision in one direction, you may begin to feel the reality of the opposite decision and its ramifications. The exercise may also result in a different kind of a dream, one that is recognized within the dream state, at least, as an introduction to a probable reality. You deal directly with future probabilities in the dream state in any case. For example, in a series of dreams you may try out various solutions to a given problem, and choose one of these.' That choice becomes your physical reality.

According to the intensity of the situation, now, another also desirable solution may be worked out in a probable reality.  On an unconscious level you are aware of your probable selves, and they of you.  You share the same psychic roots, and your joint yet separate dreams are available to “all of you”.  This does not mean that you are dreaming someone else’s dream, any more than it means that twins, for example, do.  It does mean that your probable selves and you share in a body of symbolism, background, and ability.  The multistructured nature of the dream state allows for dream dramas in which probable selves do appear.  They may appear as symbolically representing strong characteristics upon which they have focused, though you have ignored them.

The dream state, however, does operate as a rich web of communication between probable selves and probable existences.  All probabilities spring from inner reality, from the psyche’s own inner activity and structure.  The consciousness that you know can indeed now emerge into even greater realization of itself, but not by obsessively defending its old position.  Instead it must recognize its power as the director of probable action, and no longer inhibit its own great capacities.
-The Unknown Reality, Volume One, Seth Book, Jane Roberts

The Nature of Personal Reality

The atoms and molecules within you are quite literally dying and being completely replaced all the time. You are being created physically each instant. Period. The body reacts to exterior sounds and to the stimuli brought to it by the physical senses. These patterns of reaction can be clearly shown. They are all that is presently observable, however, of far greater interactions that also occur.

The atoms and molecules that compose your cells and your flesh, for instance, do not react to the physical sounds that you hear or to the light patterns that your physical eyes perceive. In times of danger your entire body must be able to move swiftly. The hormonal system must react with great rapidity, sometimes completely changing the balance of a moment earlier. The muscles must be immediately alert, and the entire body flexible enough to respond as a whole. This includes every organ and the most minute portion.

Say you are in the middle of a street and suddenly a car is about to hit you. It has come seemingly from nowhere. The cells that compose your intestines, your heart, your muscles obviously do not see the car as "you" do. Yet the whole system must be instantly activated, and the data that "you" perceive must be translated in terms that will energize every portion of your body.

This is done by translating exterior stimuli into interior stimuli, but the physical carriers of the data are all that scientists or physicians have been able to follow thus far. The greater interactions have not been perceived, and the true story of the decoding of such messages has not been understood. 

The nerves are also composed of the same kind of interior structures as mentioned earlier (in this chapter): around, or rather from which, the physical nerves form. Here the exterior data is translated and broken down into inner terms. That is, it is decoded in terms of the internal sound, light, and electromagnetic patterns discussed before.

It then becomes usable information, even in terms of the atoms and molecules that compose the cells. The physical lapse that occurs between an incoming message (pause, frowning), and its intended destination doesnot occur on these other levels. The "interior message" gets to its destination ahead of the physical one.

By the time the organism responds the inner patterns have already reacted, and this must and always does precede any physical response to stimuli. Therefore the invisible body pattern, composed of its interior light, sound and electromagnetic properties, reacts first, and actually initiates the later physical response.

There is always this translation of exterior stimuli. The perceived lapse noted by scientists is of course the physical one (leaning forward, hand to closed eyes), caused by the "time" it takes the message to leap the nerve endings.* The interior translation however is simultaneous.

Now return in your mind to the situation of the near accident. That event with the car, its driver, and your own precarious position, exists as another structure beside the one that you physically see. It also — the event — exists in the terms mentioned earlier, in a reality composed of invisible light, inaudible sound, and electromagnetic patterns.

Consciously you react to the physical data — the noise, the squeal of brakes perhaps, the visual shock of seeing the car so close, but the entire inner reality of that scene or event is instantly "recognized" by what I refer to as your inner senses. (See the note at the end of the session.) These respond to the interior patterns I've told you about. The physical data is carried through the nerves with the necessary time lapses that must occur. These represent the temporal end of the spectrum of perception.

Because you are flesh and blood creatures, the interior aspects of perception must have their physical counterparts. But material awareness and bodily response to it would be impossible were it not for these internal webworks.

Now before you see anything physically, you do so through these inner pathways. The interior perception activates the outside one. When you experience physical motion or activity, events or phenomena, you are becoming aware of the tail end of a long "series" of interior comprehensions. I am saying that all exterior events, including your own bodies with their insides, all objects, all physical materializations, are the outside structures of inside ones that are composed of interior sound and invisible light, interwoven in electromagnetic patterns.

Beneath temporal perception, then, each object and event exists in these terms, in patterns that interact with each other. On a physical level you seem to be separated from everything that is not yourself. This is not true, but in your day-to-day existence it seems to be, and it is an assumption that you usually take for granted.

On the interior level of which I have been speaking, all happenings and objects are connected. A movement or change in one affects others. You will physically respond to and recognize some of this alteration, as in the example of the near accident. But whether or not you are consciously aware of such activity, it changes the interior environment of your body through these inner pathways.

Your own thoughts and beliefs, having the same kind of inner reality, also transform the interior environments of others. The nearaccident mentioned was a physical event but it was initially a mentalone. It existed in this non-temporal reality then before, in your terms, it was physically materialized, perceived and reacted to.

It was propelled from inner reality to outward reality through belief, emotion and imagination. Because you cannot see them, it may seem to you that these qualities are not as real, say, as an object. Physically you can only see the results of an emotion, for instance. You cannot hold it in your hands as you can a stone.

Ideas represent your psychic intent. They generate emotion and imagination. These activate the interior patterns. They are the motive force of action (pause), the means by which all interior events are exteriorized. They are energy formed and directed, formulations of interior and exterior patterns of reality. They are a part of the creative force from which all realities spring. Again, we run into difficulties in explanation simply because there are few verbal equivalents for what I am trying to say.

(Deliberately:) Imagination and emotions are the most concentrated forms of energy that you possess as physical creatures. Any strong emotion carries within it far more energy than, say, that required to send a rocket to the moon.

(Very forcefully.) Emotions, instead of propelling a physical rocket, for example, send thoughts from this interior reality through the barrier between nonphysical and physical into the "objective" world — no small feat, and one that is constantly repeated.