“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Wouldn’t that be a riot?” she laughed. “But I’ve done introductions for Seth’s books, so why shouldn’t he do one for mine?” And yes, the Cézanne material mentioned earlier — see Jane’s introduction for Psyche — had developed into a full-fledged book of its own.

(A note of interest: The area immediately surrounding Elmira had some considerable flooding today, although the city itself wasn’t affected to any great degree. In any case, Jane and I were safe and dry on our little hill this time — a far cry from our experiences in the great flood of 1972, as described in The Nature of Personal Reality. After that event, we decided that a flood was one reality we could do without!)

Using this as an analogy, you are a part of your psyche or your soul, dwelling within it, easily following your own sense of identity even though that psyche also contains other identities beside the one that you think of as your own. You draw sustenance from the world, and grow through its medium. You contribute your abilities and experience, helping to form the world’s civilization and culture. To some strong degree you bear the same kind of relationship to your own psyche.

It is easy for you to see how the cells of the body form it — that is, you understand at least the cooperative nature of the cell’s activities. An alteration on the part of one cell immediately causes changes in the others, and brings about a difference in body behavior. It is somewhat more difficult for you to understand the ways in which your own actions and those of others combine to bring about world events. On the one hand, each of my readers is but one individual alive on the planet at any given “time.” It may seem that the individual has little power. On the other hand, each individual alive is a necessary one. It is true to say that the world begins and ends with each person. That is, each of your actions is so important, contributing to the experience of others whom you do not know, that each individual is like a center about which the world revolves.

(9:41.) Children often feel that the world and time began with their birth. They take the world’s past on faith. In very important terms this is quite a legitimate feeling, for no one else can experience the world from any other viewpoint except from his or her own, or affect it except through private action. En masse, that individual action obviously causes world events.

In metaphysical terms, you have your being in your psyche or soul in somewhat the same manner. Identities are obviously psychic environments, primarily, rather than physical ones. Physical objects cannot move through each other, as a table cannot move through a chair. Mental events behave differently. They can mix and merge, move through each other while still maintaining their own focus. They can interact on psychic levels in the way that events do on physical levels, but without physical restrictions. Though you are a portion of your psyche, then, your identity is still inviolate. It will not be submerged or annihilated in a greater self. It carries a stamp — a divine mark — of its own integrity. It follows its own focus, and knows itself as itself, even while its own existence as itself may be but a portion of another “identity.”

(Long pause at 10:01.) You take your breathing, your moving, for granted, though they are unconsciously produced. In certain terms, however, “at one time” you had to learn how to do these things that you are not now consciously concerned with. At still other levels of reality, activities that you now consciously claim as your own have — in those same terms and from another viewpoint — become unconscious, providing a psychic history from which other identities emerge, as it seems that your own identities emerge from unconscious bodily activity.

(10:05. “It’s hard material to get,” Jane said, in spite of her delivery, which had moved right along. “It’s one of those things where it’s unraveling as you go along. Very difficult to verbalize….” Resume in the same manner at 10:25.)

In certain very definite terms the existence of one person implies the existence of all others who have lived or will live. Your own existence is implied therefore in everyone else’s and theirs is implied in yours.

I said that languages gain their meaning largely from the pauses and hesitations between sounds. They obviously gain their meaning also because of the sounds not used, so that any one language also implies the existence of all others. To that extent, all other languages reside silently within any given spoken language. The same applies to language written upon a page. The written characters make sense because of their arrangement, and precisely because they are chosen over other characters that do not appear.

The same applies, however, to every other person. Each of them becomes a primary focus or identity within which all others are implied. In ordinary terms, you do not “make yourselves.” You are like a living language spoken by someone who did not originate it — the language was there for you to use. The language in this case is a molecular one that speaks your physical being. The components of that language or the earth elements that form the body were already created when you were born, as the alphabet of your particular language was waiting to be used.

Your very physical life, then, implies a “source,” a life out of which the physical one emerges, dash — the implied, unspoken, unmaterialized, unsounded vitality that supplied the ingredients for the physical, bodily, molecular “alphabet.” Your physical life therefore implies a nonphysical one. You take your particular “language” so for granted, and use it so effortlessly, that you give no thought at all to the fact that it implies other languages also, or that it gains its meaning because of inner assumptions that are never spoken, or by the use of pauses in which no sounds are made. You live your lives in the same fashion.

(10:49.) There are many languages, though most people speak one, or two, or three at most. Languages also have accents, each somewhat different while still maintaining the original integrity of any given language. To some extent you can learn to speak yourself with an accent, so to speak — say that I smiled — in which case, still being yourself, you allow yourself to take on some of the attributes of another “language.”

The psyche, always in a state of becoming, obviously has no precise boundaries. The existence of one, again, implies the existence of all, and so any one given psyche comes into prominence also because of the existence of the others upon which its reality rides. One television station exists in the same manner, for if one could not be tuned in to, theoretically speaking, none could.

These inner communications, then, reach outward in all directions. Each identity has eternal validity within the psyche’s greater reality. At one level, then (underlined), any person contacting his or her own psyche can theoretically contact any other psyche. Life implies death, and death implies life — that is, in the terms of your world. In those terms life is a spoken element, while death is the unspoken but still-present element “beneath,” upon which life rides. Both are equally present.

I have said that all events occur at once — a difficult statement to understand. All identities occur at once also. Each event changes every other. Present ones alter past ones. Any one event implies the existence of probable events which do not “emerge,” which are not “spoken.” Physical world events therefore rest upon the existence of implied probable events. Different languages use sounds in their own peculiar manners, with their own rhythms, one emphasizing what another ignores. Other probabilities, therefore, emphasize events that are only implied (as pauses) in your reality, so that your physical events become the implied probable ones upon which other worlds reside.

(Now Seth moved from his own book to this new subject — Jane’s The World View of Paul Cézanne — with ease and obvious zest. This was the first time in our sessions that he’s delivered material on two books in one night. He didn’t finish his work for Cézanne tonight, though.