“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.

There would be no experience of what Ruburt (Seth’s “entity” name for Jane) calls “the dear privacy of the moment,” so if one portion of your being wants to rise above the solitary march of the moments, other parts of your psyche rush, delighted, into that particular time-focus that is your own. As you now desire to understand the timeless, infinite dimensions of your own greater existence, so “even now” multitudinous elements of that nonearthly identity just as eagerly explore the dimensions of earthbeing and creaturehood.

(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.

Now the psyche in our analogy is both the painting and the artist, for the artist finds that all of the elements within the painting are portions of himself. More, as he looks about, our artist discovers that he is literally surrounded by other paintings that he is also producing. As he looks closer, he discovers that there is a still-greater masterpiece in which he appears as an artist creating the very same paintings that he begins to recognize.

(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.

Now I come from another portion of reality’s picture, from another dimension of the psyche in which your existence can be observed, as you might look upon a normal painting.

On some relatively few occasions, for example, Ruburt has been able to contact what he calls “Seth Two.” That level of reality, however, is even further divorced from your own. It represents an even greater extension of the psyche, in your terms. (Long pause.) There is a much closer relationship, in that I recognize my own identity as a distinct portion of Seth Two’s existence, where Ruburt feels little correspondence. In a manner of speaking, Seth Two’s reality includes my own, yet I am aware of my contribution to “his” experience.

In the same way, each of my readers has a connection with the same level of psychic reality. In greater terms, all of this is happening at once. Ruburt is contributing and forming a certain portion of my experience, even as I am contributing to his. Your identities are not something already completed. Your most minute action, thought, and dream adds to the reality of your psyche, no matter how grand or austere the psyche may appear to you when you think of it as a hypothetical term.