“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

If the artist paints a doorway, all of the sensed perspectives within it open, and add further dimensions of reality. Since this is our analogy, we can stretch it as far as we like — far further than any artist could stretch his canvas (leaning forward humorously). Therefore, there is no need to limit ourselves. The canvas itself can change size and shape as the artist works. The people in the artist’s painting are not simple representations either — to stare back at him with forever-fixed glassy eyes, or ostentatious smiles (again humorously), dressed in their best Sunday clothes. Instead, they can confront the artist and talk back. They can turn sideways in the painting and look at their companions, observe their environment, and even look out of the dimensions of the painting itself and question the artist.

(Pause.) Again, rather than trying to define the psyche, I will try to incite your imagination so that you can leap beyond what you have been told you are, to some kind of direct experience. To some extent this book itself provides its own demonstration. I call Jane Roberts “Ruburt” (and, hence, “he” and “him”) simply because the name designates another portion of her reality, while she identifies herself as Jane. She writes her own books and carries on as each of you do in life’s ordinary context. She has her own unique likes and dislikes, characteristics and abilities; her own time and space slot as each of you do. She is one living portrait of the psyche, independent in her own context, and in the environment as given.