On one of our previous journeys across the Dirac Sea, we encountered an unusual meeting of two great twentieth-century minds: Carl Gustav Jung and Wolfgang Pauli. One explored the depths of the human psyche, dreams, archetypes, and the collective unconscious, while the other stood at the very summit of modern physics and took part in shaping the quantum picture of the world.
Their long dialogue led them toward an idea situated at the very boundary between science and metaphysics: perhaps psyche and matter are not two entirely separate realities, but different manifestations of some deeper background that we still do not know how to describe adequately. Jung used concepts such as the psychoid and unus mundus, while Pauli spoke of a neutral background preceding the division between the physical and the psychic.
Now we will sail a little farther.
Not toward a new physical theory, and certainly not toward something we can call scientifically established knowledge, but toward an unusual metaphysical system that appeared several decades after the first conversations between Jung and Pauli.
This is the Seth Material, which the American writer and poet Jane Roberts began to transmit in the 1960s, claiming that she was speaking on behalf of a non-physical personality she called Seth. One of its best-known works, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, was published in 1972.
A reader does not have to accept the origin Roberts attributed to these texts in order to ask a more interesting question:
What is actually contained within this system of ideas, and why do some of its images, more than half a century later, sound strangely close to certain questions in modern physics and the philosophy of consciousness?
📖 Returning to an Unusual Book
I first encountered the Seth Material while I was still in high school.
It was the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period when the society in which I had grown up was changing rapidly. The system of scientific materialism, which for decades had represented an almost unquestioned philosophical framework of education in socialist Yugoslavia, was beginning to lose its former authority. Along with political and social changes, space opened for a wide range of ideas that had previously been almost entirely pushed out of public life.
At that time, my father became interested in Transcendental Meditation, Carlos Castaneda, bioenergy, NLP, and literature that today would usually be placed under the very broad label of New Age. Among the books he brought home were several substantial volumes of the Seth Material.
At the time, I had neither the knowledge nor the experience necessary to understand what I was actually reading.
In the meantime, I followed a very different path. I studied electrical engineering, continued with postgraduate studies, and eventually earned a doctorate in quantum electronics and laser technology. The physics I was trained in was the physics of equations, experiments, measurements, and mathematical models. It is a world in which a claim has value only to the extent that we know how it was derived and, whenever possible, how it can be tested.
Many years later, I returned to the Seth Material, this time reading Seth Speaks in English.
The surprise was considerable.
Not because I discovered some hidden theory of quantum gravity, but because I found something much more serious than a collection of attractive spiritual phrases and simple recipes for a happier life. Before me was an attempt to construct an entire metaphysical system, with its own ontology, epistemology, understanding of time, identity, matter, and consciousness.
From the standpoint of scientific skepticism, we may reject its premises, but it is not so easy to dismiss them as trivial.
⚛️ “Particles That Have Not Yet Emerged into Matter”
One passage in particular caught my attention:
“This is highly simplified, but the subjective experience of any consciousness is automatically expressed as electromagnetic energy units. These exist ‘beneath’ the range of physical matter. They are, if you prefer, incipient particles that have not yet emerged into matter.”
In Seth’s terminology, there appear what are called electromagnetic energy units, units said to exist beneath the threshold of physical matter and to represent a kind of transition between inner experience and physical manifestation. Within Seth’s metaphysical system itself, they have a much broader meaning than electromagnetism does in the physical sense.
When a physicist reads the phrase incipient particles that have not yet emerged into matter, it is almost impossible not to think of quantum fields, vacuum fluctuations, and virtual particles.
The parallel is tempting, although it is clear that the two are not identical.
In quantum field theory, the vacuum is not empty space, but neither is it a warehouse of tiny, fully formed particles waiting to emerge into our world. Particles are excitations of quantum fields, while virtual particles are primarily elements of the perturbative mathematical formalism used to calculate interactions. Seth’s description belongs to an entirely different ontological system, one in which subjective experience is directly connected with the emergence of physical reality.
And yet, an intriguing image remains.
Beneath the world of stable objects that we perceive, there is a more dynamic level from which they emerge.
That is an idea that strongly resonates with modern physics.
And that gives us a basis for moving further, guided by this image while remaining fully aware that speculation must not be mistaken for proof.
🌊 Matter as the Surface of a Deeper Sea
Classical intuition tells us that the things we see — a house, a tree, our own body — are the basic elements of reality.
Modern physics shattered that intuition long ago.
The atom turned out to be almost entirely empty in the classical sense. We no longer picture elementary particles as tiny hard spheres, but as quantum excitations of their corresponding fields. Even the vacuum is no longer absolute nothingness.
What we call “things” increasingly resemble relatively stable patterns within something more fundamental. In the language of this series, waves rise from the sea.
Seth takes another, far more radical step: he claims that even this deeper level is not primarily material, but connected with consciousness. At this point we leave physics behind, but this is precisely where an interesting metaphysical question begins.
What if our usual question is the wrong one?
Instead of asking:
“How does matter produce consciousness?”
we could ask:
“Are matter and consciousness two manifestations of something more fundamental?”
And Seth would go even further:
“What if consciousness itself is that which is more fundamental?”
🧠 From the Jung–Pauli Psychoid to Seth’s Primacy of Consciousness
Here we return to the metaphysical voyage of Jung and Pauli.
Their idea of a psychoid background did not claim that consciousness produces electrons or that thought directly creates physical objects. Their proposal was subtler: perhaps what we divide into the mental and the material emerges from a more unified reality in which that division does not yet exist.
For this reason, contemporary philosophical literature often discusses the Jung–Pauli approach as a form of dual-aspect monism — the idea that the mental and the physical may represent two aspects of a deeper, psychophysically neutral foundation.
Seth’s system seems to arrive at that crossroads and choose one path. The background is no longer neutral. Consciousness gains ontological priority. Matter, space, time, and physical events become secondary manifestations of a much deeper process.
That is an enormous claim, and at present we cannot regard it as a scientific one because we possess no experimental procedure capable of confirming or falsifying such an ontology.
Metaphysics, however, does not always have to provide answers. Sometimes its value lies in finding questions that we do not yet know how to formulate in the language of physics.
🔬 Why Physics Has Not Yet Had the Final Word
It is easy to forget just how successful our present physical theories are.
General relativity describes gravity and the structure of spacetime with extraordinary precision. Quantum field theory, and quantum electrodynamics in particular, rank among the most experimentally successful theoretical constructions in the history of science. Yet success is not the same as a final answer.
Our two best pictures of the world still do not form a unified theory. At scales where quantum mechanics and gravity would both have to become fully relevant, we approach the Planck regime, a domain that lies practically beyond the direct experimental reach of modern particle accelerators.
Perhaps entirely new degrees of freedom exist there. Perhaps space and time are emergent. Perhaps information is more fundamental than geometry. Perhaps some of today’s concepts will turn out to be only approximate macroscopic categories, just as temperature and pressure are real physical quantities but are not fundamental properties of an individual molecule. And perhaps our present division between the “material” and the “mental” is itself part of such an approximate description.
We do not know. That is not a weakness of science. Quite the opposite. It is the space in which science continues to live.
🧭 Metaphysics as a View Beyond the Horizon
Ancient navigators did not possess satellite images of the Earth. They had incomplete maps, the stars, compasses, experience, and many assumptions — some brilliant, some entirely wrong. Yet they sailed.
That is how I understand metaphysical speculation when it is used with restraint. It is not a substitute for experiment, nor does it acquire the status of physics merely because it uses words such as energy, vibration, or electromagnetism. But it can represent an attempt to look conceptually beyond the edge of the existing map.
Most such voyages will probably not discover a new continent. That is to be expected. But the history of science teaches us that almost every major expansion of our picture of reality required someone, at some point, to consider a possibility that looked very unusual from the perspective of contemporary knowledge.
That is not a reason to believe every unusual idea.
It is a reason not to stop asking questions.
🪞 Jane Roberts, Seth — or the Depths of the Human Unconscious?
There is, of course, a much more immediate explanation for the entire phenomenon.
Perhaps Seth never existed as an independent intelligence. Perhaps Jane Roberts, while in an altered state of consciousness, was accessing parts of her own psyche that were unavailable to her in her ordinary state. Perhaps she unconsciously combined material she had read, intuition, literary talent, the philosophical ideas of her time, and her own ability to create exceptionally coherent narratives.
Even that possibility is not uninteresting. Quite the opposite.
If Seth was entirely a product of Jane Roberts’ mind, then a fascinating question remains: how can the human mind construct such a broad, internally connected system and then experience it as something coming from beyond the boundaries of the ordinary self?
At that point, we would find ourselves back with Jung.
Who is actually speaking when content rises from the depths of the psyche that the conscious ego does not experience as its own? Jung would probably remind us that the unconscious is not merely a container in which forgotten memories are stored. His conception of the unconscious was far more radical, involving autonomous complexes, archetypal patterns, and structures that the ego does not create through conscious will.
And so the circle closes again.
Even if we reject Seth’s own explanation of Seth, the problem of consciousness has not disappeared.
It has merely moved deeper.
⛵ Seth in the Dirac Sea
Let us imagine our Dirac Sea once again.
Across its familiar surface sail tested theories, experiments, mathematical formalisms, and the technologies we successfully build upon them.
Deeper down lie questions to which we still have no answers: quantum gravity, the origin of spacetime, the nature of measurement, dark matter, dark energy, and the nature of consciousness itself.
And somewhere near the edge of our map lie ideas that do not yet belong to physics: Jung’s unus mundus, Pauli’s psychoid Hintergrund, philosophical theories of primary consciousness — and Seth’s claim that what we call physical reality emerges from a much deeper world of consciousness.
Perhaps all these ideas are merely false coastlines drawn on old maps.
Perhaps future physics will show that consciousness arises entirely from a sufficiently complex organization of matter, and that no deeper psychophysical background is required.
But we can also imagine a different outcome. Perhaps a future theory will show that matter, space, time, information, and what we call consciousness share a common root that today we do not yet possess even the mathematics to describe precisely.
If that ever happens, it would not mean that Seth had been “proven.”
Science does not work that way.
It would mean only that one unusual metaphysical intuition had asked a question in a direction that was not entirely meaningless.
For now, only the horizon remains, and the same open water across which we sailed with Jung and Pauli.
Is consciousness a product of the universe — or is the universe one of the ways in which something deeper, which we call consciousness, expresses itself?
I do not know the answer. I do not think anyone knows it today.
But that is precisely why it is worth continuing the voyage.
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