“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we sat waiting for the session to begin at 9:20, Jane told me she’d just “picked up” the heading for Chapter Three of Seth’s book: “Telepathy and Belief Gathering” — or “Idea Gathering”; she wasn’t sure which. We’ll see how close she came. At 9:25 she said, “I’m getting ready to start now. I can tell….” She lit a cigarette and looked off to one side and down, her attention already turned inward as she prepared to psychically join a very familiar “energy personality essence,” as Seth calls himself.)

Now these may be the result of one specific belief, or caused by a complex of beliefs held together.

(9:40.) We will speak about health and illness more specifically later in the book. I would like to make one point here, however — that often psychoanalysis is simply a game of hide-and-seek, in which you continue to relinquish responsibility for your actions and reality and assign the basic cause to some area of the psyche, hidden in a dark forest of the past. Then you give yourself the task of finding this secret. In so doing you never think of looking for it in the conscious mind, since you are convinced that all deep answers lie far beneath — and, moreover, that your consciousness is not only unable to help you but will often send up camouflages instead. So you play that game.

When and if you manage to change your beliefs in that self-deceptive framework, then any suitable “forgotten” event from the past will be used as a catalyst. One would do as well as another.

(Pause at 9:45, one of many. Now rock music began to blare out from one of the apartments below us. I felt the very floor vibrate, but Jane, in trance, didn’t seem to be bothered.)

(“I’ve even got directions.” She pointed off to her upper right as she sat in her rocker. “Seth comes through on his book from here, on this channel.” Next she indicated her lower right. “Then over here, immediately available, is Seth on you and me and Willy. And also on the portrait you asked me about the other day — the one you just finished.

(“Over here now,” Jane said, designating her upper left, “is Seth on what you were just saying about peer groups — how young people feel it’s so important to fit in with their own kind, and why. And why I felt that way, but you didn’t. Hey, I’ve even got a bunch of history about that, all ready to deliver — a lot of material on each idea…. I was really confused for a while, yet now I see that each thing’s separate, already prepared by Seth. You’re not going to get two sentences about one subject, then switch to another one….” Jane laughed. “Which channel do you want?”

(“Each channel is as clear as a bell. There’s no static or bleed-through between them. There: Now I’ve just got another one”— Jane pointed to her lower left — “and it explains all of this.” She laughed again. “Just call me station J-A-N-E….”)

3. In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma is thought of as the total moral sum of an individual’s acts in any one life — thus determining the person’s fate or destiny in the next. Seth sees reincarnational lives as all existing at once, so there is constant give-and-take among them. A “future” life, then, can affect a “past” one, so karma as it is usually considered does not apply.

(Pause. Note the difference between Seth’s heading for this chapter and the one Jane gave before the session.)

The ego attempts to maintain a clear point of focus, of stability, so that it can direct the light of the conscious mind with some precision and concentrate its focus in areas of actuality that seem permanent. As mentioned (in Chapter One), the ego, while a portion of the whole self, can be defined as a psychological “structure,” composed of characteristics belonging to the personality as a whole, organized together to form a surface identity.

You must change the belief. I will give you methods to allow you to do this. You may follow your thoughts in another area, and find yourself thinking that you are having difficulty because you are too sensitive. Finding the thought you may say, “But it is true; I am. I react with such great emotion to small things.” But that is a belief, and a limiting one.

I will end our session. I will see to it that I speak about your painting before or after book dictation. (Louder, jovially:) I am on channel one this evening. My heartiest regards.

(“Telling Rob and our friends about the channels that I became aware of in the last session,” Jane wrote, “I suddenly began drawing upon the one with the information about conformity and the need for individual expression.

(“I realized that Seth had a great amount of information all gathered and there, including the biological foundations of both characteristics. Take the amoeba, a one-celled microscopic animal, for instance: I knew that the protoplasm in the amoeba, the essential living matter, represents the individual needing-to-go-out quality. Yet the protoplasm must conform to its environment — in this case the amoeba’s ‘body,’ which can only move as a unit when directed by the individualistic need to react to stimuli.

(“This is just a sample of the implications called up by Rob’s talk about peer groups in the session Wednesday. The material itself has much more available on biological aspects, plus cultural and historical ones. It could also discuss the same question from the view of the growth of the human body and the development, say, of cancer cells that break out of a conforming pattern and superimpose a ‘new’ one, their own, on the unit structure….