“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I am not saying that words cannot be used to describe the psyche, but they cannot define it. It is futile to question: “What is the difference between my psyche and my soul, my entity and my greater being?” for all of these are terms used in an effort to express the greater portions of your own experience that you sense within yourself. Your use of language may make you impatient for definitions, however. Hopefully this book will allow you some intimate awareness, some definite experience, that will acquaint you with the nature of your own psyche, and then you will see that its reality escapes all definitions, defies all categorizing, and shoves aside with exuberant creativity all attempts to wrap it up in a neat package.

When you begin a physical journey, you feel yourself distinct from the land through which you travel. No matter how far you journey — on a motorcycle, in a car or plane, or on foot — (gesturing to me as Seth, Jane then changed the sentence) by bicycle or camel, or truck or vessel, still you are the wanderer, and the land or ocean or desert is the environment through which you roam. When you begin your travels into your own psyche, however, everything changes. You are still the wanderer, the journeyman or journey-woman — but you are also the vehicle and the environment. You form the roads, your method of travel, the hills or mountains or oceans, as well as the hills, farms, and villages of the self, or of the psyche, as you go along.

(Long pause.) Let us try another analogy: You are an artist in the throes of inspiration. There is before you a canvas, and you are working in all areas of it at once. In your terms each part of the canvas could be a time period — say, a given century. You are trying to keep some kind of overall balance and purpose in mind, so when you make one brushstroke in any particular portion of this canvas, all the relationships within the entire area can change. No brushstroke is ever really wiped out, however, in this mysterious canvas of our analogy, but remains, further altering all the relationships at its particular level.

These magical brushstrokes, however, are not simple representations on a flat surface, but alive, carrying within themselves all of the artist’s intent, but focused through the characteristics of each individual stroke.

In those terms, I am outside of your “frame” of reference. My perspective cannot be contained in your own painting of reality. I write my books, but because my primary focus is in a reality that “is larger than your own,” I cannot appear as myself fully within your reference.

(10:20.) So Ruburt’s subjective perspective opens up because of his desire and interest, and discloses my own. He opens up a door in himself that leads to other levels of his being, but a being that cannot be completely expressed in your world. That existence is mine, expressed in my experience at another level of reality, so I must write my books through Ruburt. Doors in the psyche are different from simple openings that lead from one room to another, so my books only show a glimpse of my own existence. You all have such psychological doors, however, that lead into dimensionally greater areas of the psyche, so to some extent or another I speak for those other aspects of yourselves that do not appear in your daily context.

(11:31. But no break ensued. Seth continued speaking:)

As you read this book, you are also immersed in such intimate physical experiences. Do not consider them as separated from the greater reality of your being, but as a part of it. You do not exist outside of your psyche’s being, but within it. Some of you may have just put children to bed as you read these lines. Some of you may be sitting at a table. Some of you may have just gone to the bathroom. These mundane activities may seem quite divorced from what I am telling you, yet in each simple gesture, and in the most necessary of physical acts, there is the great magical unknowing elegance in which you reside — and in the most ordinary of your motions, there are clues and hints as to the nature of the psyche and its human expression.

(It was 11:50. Jane had been in an excellent trance state. After we talked for a few minutes, she added: “My God, I’ve got Chapter Two. No, it’s too late! I don’t have the heading for Chapter One yet, but I’ve got it for the next one….” She looked bleary, her eyes dark. I told her she appeared to be too tired to continue.

(“No, I’m not,” she retorted. Her denial was both funny and dogged, for I could see that she was tired. But she went on: “Now let me get a couple of paragraphs on the chapter… The heading is: ‘Your Dreaming Psyche Is Awake.’” Then Seth came through at once:)