“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“There was something very contradictory about the affair: The soldier-self I saw atop the tower was a Roman — whereas, according to the little I know of those times, such a position should have been occupied by a native Jew, who was perhaps a lookout for the city behind him. I saw, dimly, the outline of the typical Roman helmet, what seemed to be a leather vestment or short-sleeved garment, the upper portion of the shaft of a spear. I don’t think the ‘me’ I watched was an officer, as had been the case in my third Roman, of October 30.

“My own defiance is a peaceful one having to do with ideas. I see my two Romans physically undergoing an exploration of the opposite sides of rebellion or subversion, within the context of a much closer, more oppressive military authority: For whatever reasons, the Roman officer is turned upon and thrown into the Mediterranean to drown (as described in Note 1 for the 715th session)⁷; my Roman soldier, a man of lesser rank, has evidently betrayed his sworn position of trust, and is caught in authority’s vice. I think all of this could be counterpart action, all right, personified by two selves living in the same narrow time period, in close proximity in the same geographical area of the Middle East.⁸

For another thing, what was my nameless Roman self doing on that tower? I didn’t “see” the reasons and actions leading to his presence there, and I doubt if I ever will. In my reference works I read accounts describing how Pontius Pilate, the Procurator (or governor) of Judea from approximately A.D. 26 to A.D. 36, had organized hunts for members of the Zealots, the Jewish political-religious sect that had consistently rebelled against the rule of the Roman Empire. This is the correct general time period for my visions, I think, and I felt a surge of thrilling sensations as I learned about certain subversive Zealot activities. Then I “picked up” that my soldier-self was killed by his countrymen because he’d traitorously sought to warn Zealot leaders of a planned search of the lower city of Jerusalem by Roman troops. My thrills deepened considerably — and those feelings of rightness were what I settled for; I could carry my wonderings no further, nor did I want to.

“What would a Roman soldier be doing up there?, I wondered. For below, on the flat ground outside the wall, were the hordes⁴ of the Roman army. I don’t know whether they were preparing for an attack, or had some other reason to be assembled there. I saw only a forest of helmets and spears pointing upward, with light glinting dully on metal here and there. I write ‘saw,’ yet it would be just as accurate to note that I sensed these figures. They were turned toward the soldier on the tower.

[...] There were many such villages in the mountains in the overall times of Nebene and your Roman soldier, and they were much in character like the villages recently destroyed in the earthquake. [...] Those Italian villages exemplified really a kind of consciousness, or an orientation of consciousness, that existed before modern psychology and Darwinian belief: a framework of consciousness and experience that was overall similar in the recent past and in the time of the Romans—one, in other words, that existed up into the present. [...]

[...] The people compared themselves to the rest of the world at times, and many of the young were beginning to leave, but those villages were, again, very like those in the times of Nebene and the Roman soldier. They had been plundered at times by wandering Roman soldiers of Rome’s empire. [...]

[...] (Pause.) The Roman soldier had been in several skirmishes in such a village, stealing livestock for his companions. Nebene had hidden out in one such village from the Romans. [...]

[...] The people believed that those ancestors still existed in the Christian heaven—or, earlier, in the Roman equivalent and they also believed that such a dimension awaited them to give them a further extension of existence after their own deaths. [...]

(At the conclusion of the 720th session I mentioned the Roman-soldier visions I’d had near the end of October, and added that I would soon go into my questions about them. [...] This one wasn’t a “Roman,” though, but a series of very vivid impressions of myself as a black woman on the island of Jamaica, in the Caribbean Sea. [...]

[...] Last month he also saw himself as a Roman soldier aboard a slave ship. He previously had experience that convinced him that he was a man called Nebene.⁹ All of this could have been accepted quite easily in conventional terms of reincarnation, but Joseph felt that Nebene and the Roman soldier had existed during the same general time period, and he was not sure where to place the woman (but see Note 1).

The Roman soldier dreams of the black woman, and of Joseph. [...] Now the Roman soldier and Nebene and the woman went their separate ways after death, colon: They contributed to the world as it existed, in those terms, and then followed their own lines of development, elsewhere, in other realities. [...]

12. My Roman-soldier self might have “followed authority without question,” as Seth states in this (721st) session, yet he must have behaved with more than a little guile. In a private session held some time after he’d finished “Unknown” Reality, Seth again referred to the Roman — doing so because of additional material I’d produced about that first century personality. [...]

[...] A descendant of the Romans. A-c-r-i-l-a (spelled out), a descendant of the Roman tribes, brought to Germany by the Romans to secure the Empire.

1. In Note 1 for Session 715, I described my “first and second Romans” — internal visions or perceptions that had come to me as I lay down for afternoon naps last Sunday and Monday. Each time I’d evidently seen myself as a Roman military officer living early in the first century A.D. In the first episode I was aboard a galley in the Mediterranean; in the second, I floated face down in that sea with my hands bound behind me.

And added later: Jane did use my three Roman experiences in her Psychic Politics; she’d mentioned doing so after the second one had taken place, and ended up quoting my own accounts of them in Chapter 4. (As I wrote up my third vision, incidentally, I called myself “captain,” automatically using present-day terminology to denote a certain military rank Then I began to wonder if such a classification had even existed in the Roman armed forces in those ancient times. [...]

(In Note 1, I described my third “Roman,” which took place this afternoon. [...]

[...] When I woke up I made another little drawing: I showed my Roman-captain self still face down in the water, but entangled with the branches projecting from a waterlogged tree trunk — I’d been caught that way for a while, before a group of fishermen on a North American beach hauled body and tree ashore in their net. [...]

(The dictionary tells us that the Stoic philosopher and statesman, Cato, was a Roman, and lived from 95—46 BC. He was called Marcus Porcius the Younger; his great grandfather, Marcus Porcius the Elder, was a Roman statesman who lived from 234—149 BC.

[...] While I was a Roman and a citizen, my citizenship meant little except for providing me with minimal safety as I went about my daily way, and in my business I encountered as many Jews as Romans. [...]

The Romans had no clear idea of the number of Jews in Rome at that time. [...] They came secretly into town, hiding as much from other Jews as from Romans. [...]

The Christians, generally speaking, did not want Roman converts. [...]

This afternoon, Monday, I decided upon a nap once again, and once again I was aware of myself as the Roman officer; at least I thought I was that individual. [...] I’m citing it here so that I can present my “first and second Romans,” as I call them, together.

(See Note 1 for descriptions of the [two] unusual mental events I experienced Sunday and today: I may have seen myself as a Roman military officer in the first century A.D.

[...] In the episode of interest here, I saw myself back in the first century A.D.: I was an officer of rather high rank in a Roman legion, and I was aboard a small galley in the Mediterranean Sea. [...]

No sooner had I described this second adventure to Jane than she surprised me by saying she might use both of the Roman experiences in Politics. She thought she could tie them in with her material on the “ever-changing models for physical reality” that she’d obtained from her psychic library last Friday morning.

(Yesterday afternoon, to my surprise, I had still another internal vision experience with a Roman counterpart self of mine in the first century A.D.; it was reminiscent of my three Romans of last October, yet perplexing, too — for this time I saw a different Roman counterpart. [...]

So you, Joseph, were Nebene, and the black woman, and the Roman soldier,³ and yet you were none of those. [...]

[...] I called my version of it my “fourth Roman,” and presented an account of it in Appendix 22; through internal pictures I saw, in Jerusalem in the first century A.D., the violent death of my traitorous Roman-soldier counterpart.

[...] In those notes I also referred to the experiences of my Roman and Jamaican counterparts — episodes that, I wrote, “played some considerable part in establishing a foundation, or impetus for such a development” (as the counterpart one). [...]

[...] Once you ‘killed your enemy,’ (and therefore yourself) — like the Roman soldier in Jerusalem — and realized it, did something change the counterpart connection? [...]

[...] You do share psychic memories, and hold in common the memories of other selves who did live in the time of your (fourth) Roman-soldier incident.

[...] (Pause.) The seemingly local Jewish god (Yahweh/Jehovah) ended up in one way or another by destroying the Roman Empire, and in so doing brought about a complete reorganization of planetary culture.

[...] The church, however — the Roman Catholic Church — still held a repository of religious ideas and concepts that served as a bank of probabilities from which the race could draw. [...]

(Long pause.) Other democratic societies had existed in the past, but in them democracy was still based on one religious precept, though it might be expressed in different ways — as, for example, in the Greek city-states (in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.). The Holy Roman Empire united a civilization under one religious idea, but the true brotherhood of man can be expressed only by allowing the freedom of man’s thought under the banner of cooperation; and only this will result in the fulfillment of the species, with developments of consciousness that in your terms were latent from the beginning.

[...] But [this was] then carried over so that you wanted to keep your Roman (reincarnational) world and this [present] one separate and not merge them through association — as you did — so that it was difficult to know this when you did your sketches. [...]

[...] In them I described a series of episodes during which I saw myself as a captain in a Roman military force, early in the first century A.D.

[...] (a one minute pause at 9:06.) There is some reincarnational influence, in that you and she were acquaintances (long pause), of a minor variety, however—once in your Roman soldier existence, and I believe in the Denmark one. [...]

[...] [Perhaps my desire will help make one available to me.] Interesting, then, that I subsequently have the dream involving Debbie, with the Roman captain connections.)

Woodcuts and wood blocks were used for a variety of purposes by the ancient Chinese and Egyptians, for example, and even by the Romans. [...] One of the first dated European woodcuts, showing a religious figure, appeared in 1423; a book bearing woodcut illustrations was produced circa 1460; the first Roman book containing woodcuts was made in 1467. [...]

[...] While the Roman Catholic Church gave him a powerful, cohesive belief system (pause), for many reasons those beliefs shifted so that the division between man and God became too great. [...]

[...] There are some exceptions of note, but here I am speaking historically of the Western world with its Roman and Greek heritage. [...]

[...] Before the so-called flowering of Greek and Roman cultures, consciousness had not as yet made that specialization. [...]

[...] When you read the reincarnational information, (about the Roman captain on September 12, 1977), it triggered the Nebene material because of your own personal situation at the time—your mood, and so forth (on September 20, 1977). [...]

[...] In our casual conversation I happened to remark that I now had three things going reincarnationally: The Nabene thing, the Roman thing, and the Jamaica thing, toward my chronological “list” of “past” lives.

[...] The notion of one life at a time, in any time period, is bullshit—the psyche is so rich that it can have more than one life at a time—like your Nabene and Roman lives together, in the first century A.D. But if you tell people that you’ll get them all confused....”

[...] You are as close to the beginning of [your] world as Adam and Eve were, or as the Romans, or as the Egyptians or Sumerians. [...]

[...] The Romans identified Zeus with their own supreme god, Jupiter, or Jove.

[...] Briefly, most authorities in the Roman Catholic Church realize that almost all of those who are supposed to be “possessed” by malevolent forces are in actuality mentally ill people who need treatment. [...]

[...] Before the Roman gods were fully formalized, there was a spectacular range of good and bad deities, with all gradations [among them], that more or less “democratically” represented the unknown but sensed, splendid and tumultuous characteristics of the human soul, and have stood for those sensed but unknown glimpses of his own reality that man was in one way or another determined to explore.

[...] Embedded within it were these lines: “Ruburt’s idea did come from me, about your reincarnational episodes involving the Roman officer, and your personal experience illustrates what I am saying in ‘Unknown’ Reality — the individual’s history is written in the psyche, and can indeed be uncovered.” [...]

(My “three Romans” are presented in the first notes for sessions 715–16. [...]