“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I am being maligned. I have spoken to our Lady of Florence over here many times and you could have explained to our new student what I mean. I should be quiet and let you do so. You do indeed choose your own environment and your own life circumstances. And before this life you have already set those challenges that you will meet. But you also are endowed with free will and there is no punishment except [for] those of you who choose to punish yourselves. There is no punishment in those terms. You grow in understanding, and if you kill, then it is necessary that you learn what it means to be a victim and so you become a victim if you choose. You may indeed learn what it is to be a victim in other ways. You must learn how to use the consciousness that is yourself.

You said earlier that everyone is looking to find themselves, and as our regular students should know, there is only one place to look, and you begin with yourself. All That Is is not male or female, and I am sorry to upset anyone. All That Is is indeed energy and yet all energy is individualized so you are not dealing merely with impersonal energy but neither are you dealing with a personality in the terms usually used. For you do not understand as yet what personality is, and when you understand what you are, then you will have some small glimmering of what All That Is is and basically you will find All That Is within yourselves.

You will find All That Is also within a leaf and within a flower. But only when you try to understand what a leaf and a flower are. If you believe that a leaf is a piece of physical matter without consciousness, without glory, then you will learn nothing from it. But if you realize that a leaf is a portion of All That Is then you will realize what communion is.

I have said many of these things in my own way before and will undoubtedly say them again—not only through this physical image. For when this physical image makes the transition to other realities, then I will speak through another form as each of you has spoken through other forms. I remember the forms through which I have spoken and you do not, but look at it this way: The child that you were in this life has a far different form than the person you are now, and yet you spoke through that form.

If it were not for these energies you would not have children; if it were not for these energies you would not be alive. You worry and all of you worry at one time or another about that which you do not know consciously. Yet you do not know consciously how you breathe and if you did you would be dead, because you could not consciously handle the millions of manipulations that must take place in order to assure one breath. These are the energies of which you speak. These are the energies that allow you to sit as you do upright in the chair when you do not consciously know how your muscles hold you up; and when you begin to speak you do not know consciously with what word your sentence will end; nor do you consciously know how you speak nor indeed from where the thought comes.

I can imagine a lovely scene where bodiless individuals, spiritual psychologists and I, sit in a dark room all dressed in gowns at another level of reality, and they ask me what is wrong with me and I say—I am obsessed. I have it in my head that there is a physical reality somewhere where objects have shape and form—where there are things like trees and people and streetcars and a strange thing called progress. And where people believe in things like ghosts and demons all on the same line, seeing little difference between them and I imagine in my most schizoid (Doug—“that’s what I said”) moments that there is a woman called Jane Butts in a strange, funny little town in a completely fantastic place called Elmira, New York. And I have the delusion that I speak through this woman and look out through her eyes at the most fantastic creatures imaginable.

But they have no way to treat me. Because they are behind me, the scene is too good to miss and they have never seen a psychology like your own. For if my reality now seems strange to you—your reality seems very strange to me and do not forget that these now familiar characteristics by which you know me are only those that I use as teaching methods. The portion of myself that I show to make my point.

What you do not realize is that in other ways that you may not understand I am also graded on your progress and I am not doing very well on you. It is well known that these classes are held.

There are indeed. Both in this reality and others. Ruburt, though he does not know this yet consciously, is also in another class in another dimension of reality—for I teach him while he is asleep. He does not talk back that way.

It is the idea behind the Catholic conception of guardian angels. Now why these personalities should be envisioned as overgrown birds is beyond me for everyone knows what birds do on rooftops.

([Gert:] “This is also true of what we have been calling limbo?”)

([Gert:] “Now when you say that about creativity.... What then about planned parenthood? The use of contraceptives to deliberately prohibit a new life?”)

([Gert:] “You are blessed, Seth. What about us who have the problem. Deliberately not allowing a life to begin?”)

Now many of these matters do not concern you. You are well-dressed and well-fed. But many men and women are indeed starving. You cannot consume your planet. You will not be allowed to consume your planet. Free will is yours, however, and if you decide to ignore these inner realities you can destroy your planet and it will do you no good to cry to a God, for the God would not have destroyed your planet. You will have done so because you do not realize the sacred nature of consciousness.

([Florence:] “What about the life that is aborted?”)

(Words lost) you experience—as you listen to my melodious tones and look upon my godly countenance, it is not myself. As I have explained in my book, but also in the Seth material to date, there is a psychological bridge that is constructed not only in this situation but in any like legitimate situation. What you see, therefore, is a representation of what I am. I am not Ruburt. I am myself. In your terms, however, and strictly in your terms, I could seem to be a future Ruburt, and if you were in connection with other more eternal portions of your own personality that you could not materialize in physical terms. This does not mean, however, that the person would not be entirely independent and have an existence completely divorced from your own.