“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Before proceeding I want to make clear just what I mean by “reincarnational selves” (while confining this discussion to “past” lives for the moment). For it’s also contradictory to say, for example, that “I was a serf in the 12th-century Germanic state of Bavaria.” As Seth and I both noted in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, each of us has our focus of identity now—not in some other portion of the spacious present, just as each reincarnational self has his or her own historical focus of identity. How could it be otherwise?

The serf will invariably be looking at his time through a different focus than his future self could ever do. And think of the added challenges of feeling and perception where sexual changes between present and past incarnations are involved! Eroticism—and yes, outright sexual curiosity and arousal over reversed genitalia, for instance—must enter in sometimes, although in print at least these specifics of sex in connection with reincarnation seem to be a taboo subject. By contrast, there’s plenty of material in the reincarnational literature on the generalized patterns of sexual behavior, from promiscuity to repression. (I wonder whether a long-term past-life sexual fantasy could be connected to a real sexual problem or challenge in a present—or future—life.)

But would our time traveler ever want to give up his or her present mental and physical focus to enter completely into an earlier personality? I think not, in the overwhelming majority of cases—and perhaps never—for in those terms it would mean surrendering a portion of the whole self or entity that had, through a projection into our scheme of “present” time, attained a certain consciousness and physical form of a unique degree. Yet, on second thought I wouldn’t dare rule out completely such bizarre developments. Perhaps transfers like that can and do take place within the vast arena of probable realities (which I’ll also be discussing in this essay). If so, then, they would be strange only from our limited viewpoints.

“When I write poetry I can often feel that translife focus, and catch the ‘real facts.’”

Her focus on her book about the magical approach never jelled enough for her to carry it through, even though she continued experimenting with it. Our own general psychological unease certainly contributed to that failure, but Jane’s writing became bogged down in details about dates, quotations from old sessions, and elaborate studies built upon our dream accounts and other psychic and daily records, for example. Not her way of working, really, even though all of those ingredients were—and are—excellent.

Before presenting the promised excerpts on the magical approach, I want to note that Seth is simply saying that from Framework 2 (and possibly from other frameworks) we draw whatever information we want in whatever way we choose to focus upon it: positively, negatively, magically, literally, skeptically, and so forth. As he told us in a private session way back on February 26, 1972: “You get what you concentrate upon. There is no other main rule.” Every reincarnational and counterpart and probable self, located in whatever neatly packaged compartment of time—past, present, or future—can utilize the magical approach as a matter of choice, then. That simple declaration of use involves a world of understanding and experience, however, and one that Jane and I have found extremely difficult to initiate in the way we consciously think we want to—although according to their letters, at least, many of our readers are able to work with various portions of the Seth material with little or no trouble at all.