“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The word “passive” is a poor one to describe the characteristics of the anima, in that it suggests a lack of motion, and this is hardly the case. It is true that the anima allows itself to be acted upon, but the motive behind this is the desire and the necessity to tune into other forces that are supremely powerful. The desire to be swept along, therefore, is as strong with the anima as the opposite desire for rest. The characteristics of the animus provide the aggressive thrust that returns the personality back outward into physical activities, triumphantly holding the products of creativity that the anima characteristics have secured.

The animus and the anima become even more important in these instances when a series of one-sex lives are chosen. The original pattern for the animus and anima comes from the whole self before reincarnations. The animus and the anima are born into the individual with the first physical life, and serve as an inner pattern, reminding the personality of its basic unity. Here is another reason for the strong psychic charge behind these symbols and the godlike quality that they can transmit and project.

The projection of the man’s anima, or hidden female self, upon [his] relations is quite natural, and allows him not only to understand them better but to relate with the other female existences of his own. The same is true of the woman’s projection of the animus upon male relatives and friends. The reality of the anima and the animus is far deeper then than Jung supposed. Symbolically speaking, the two together represent the whole self with its diverse abilities, desires, and characteristics.

In dreams this reincarnational material is likewise cast into a dramatic mold very frequently. Beneath all this, the anima and the animus work together, again not opposites but blending characteristics. Together, of course, they represent the fount of creativity, psychically as well as physically.

The anima, therefore, is an important safeguard, preventing the male from over-identifying with whatever cultural male characteristics have been imposed upon him through present background, environment, and education. The anima serves not only as a personal but as a mass-civilizing influence, mellowing strongly aggressive tendencies and serving also as a bridge both in communicating with women in a family relationship, and in communication also as it is applied through the arts and verbalization.

[...] This personification of femaleness in the male is the true meaning of what Jung called the “anima.”

The anima in the male is, therefore, the psychic memory and identification of all the previous female existences in which the inner self has been involved. [...]

Through the anima and the animus, so-called, present personalities are able to draw upon the knowledge and intuitions and background that was derived from past existences as the opposite sex. [...]

[...] Here we become concerned again with the animus and the anima. If a personality believes that it is doing a poor job in a male life, it may activate the anima’s qualities, taking on the characteristics of a past female existence in which it handled itself well. [...]

[...] Anima would be the female characteristics subconsciously incorporated in the male.

Talk about reflections, because Ruburt has an anima!

In Seth Speaks, Seth developed Jung’s ideas about the anima and the animus by stating that such other-sex qualities or personifications within each of us actually represent memories of past lives. (Jung himself thought the questions of reincarnation, and of karma [or, roughly, destiny or fate], to be “obscure” — he couldn’t be sure of the existence of such phenomena.) From Session 555 for October 21, 1970: “The anima and the animus … are highly charged psychically, and also appear in the dream state. [...] And from Session 556: “The reality of the anima and the animus is far deeper than Jung supposed. Symbolically speaking, the two together represent the whole self with its diverse abilities, desires, and characteristics … Personality as you know it cannot be understood unless the true meaning of the anima and the animus is taken into consideration.”

17. For many readers Seth’s remarks about the anima and the animus will require a bit of explaining. Carl Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, postulated that the unconscious of the male contains a female, archetypal (or typical, instinctive) figure called the “anima”; the correlative male form in the unconscious of the female Jung called the “animus.” In Session 119, then, Seth comments on how Jane herself has an animus — the hidden male within — and on how Ruburt, that larger “male” entity of which she is a “self-conscious part,” contains an anima, or hidden female. [...]

[...] Talk about reflections — because Ruburt has an anima!¹⁷