“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The supposedly telepathic messages can be attributed to contemporaries—enemies, gods, devils, or what have you. Spacemen are a recent addition. In most cases, what you have here are expressions of strong portions of the self that are more or less purposefully kept in isolation. They may appear or disappear, psychologically speaking. They present a kind of chain of command—one that is not usually permanent for any long period, however.

(9:19.) You have schizophrenic models, in other words, and the particular model chosen in any case, at any given time—for the models change—gives indications quite clearly of the person’s basic problems and dilemmas. Such cultural models are present in society to begin with, because in one way or another they express in an exaggerated form certain portions of man’s psychological reality that he does not as yet understand. This applies to the “good” schizophrenic models and to the “bad” ones—that is, to the gods as well as to the demons.

(A one-minute pause at 9:29.) Devils and demons have no objective existence. They have always represented, again, portions of mankind’s own psychological reality that to some extent he had not assimilated—but in a schizophrenic kind of expression, projected instead outward from himself. Therefore, it does not seem he must be held accountable for acts that he considers debasing, or cruel. He isolates himself from that responsibility by imagining the existence of other forces—the devils or demons of the nether world.

Such people, however, in their fashion refuse to accept standardized versions of reality. Even though they are so uncertain of themselves that their psychological patterns do follow those of culture, religion, science, or whatever, they try to use those patterns in their own individual ways. They are actually in the process of putting their own personalities together long after most people have settled upon one official version or another—and so their behavior gives glimpses of the ever-changing give-and-take among the various elements of human personality.

In your terms of time, man has always projected unassimilated psychological elements of his own personality outward, but in much earlier times he did this using a multitudinous variety of images, personifications, gods, goddesses, demons and devils, good spirits and bad. 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.

It was understood that all of these “forces” had their parts to play in human events. Some stood for forces of nature that could very well be at times advantageous, and at times disadvantageous—as, for example, the god of storms might be very welcome at one time, in periods of drought, while his powers might be quite dreaded if he overly satisfied his people. There was no chasm of polarity between the “good gods and the bad ones.”

There were no schizophrenics in the time of the pagans, for the belief systems did not support that kind of interpretation. This does not mean that certain behavior did not occur that you would now call schizophrenic. It means that generally speaking such behavior fit within the psychological picture of reality. It [did so] because many of the behavior patterns associated, now, with schizophrenia, are “distorted and debased” remnants of behavior patterns that are part and parcel of man’s heritage, and that harken back to activities and abilities that at one time had precise social meaning, and served definite purposes.

10:26 P.M. I told Jane that the session is another excellent one, “I do believe he’s going to go on with that material,” she said. I hope so, for it appears that Seth is far from carrying his discussion through to the subject of reincarnation. I’m most interested that he do so.)