“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

‘Well,’ I say, ‘Do you remember a younger couple staring at you in a night club? They couldn’t take their eyes off you.

‘Look, do you recall anything about physical birth? About being a child?’ I ask. It occurs to me that maybe they can’t.

‘You have their early memories.’ They seem to believe me. I say, ‘Do you remember the last time we met in the pavillion?’

The two of them don’t answer me. They seem to be sharing a secret. ‘Look,’ I say again, to explain. ‘This is a probable system of reality, one of many. In the one I come from, I also know Jane and Rob Butts. Do you remember that?’

‘The last books are on the Seth Material,’ I continue, watching them. ‘Do you know about Seth yet?’

‘And you do remember the last time we met? And you must remember this meeting,’ I say.

Carl nods. At once I realize that somewhere — I don’t understand where — Carl does not own a cycle and that the two of us are man and wife, and have a baby. It is as though I am remembering physical life as a dream, and yet I have the feeling that Carl and I have done this cycle bit before, that we are doing it still in another place and that we will do it even as we are doing it now. The all-at-oneness seems perfectly natural.

You are upset over the implication of probable selves, and that caused the headache. Simply tell yourself that you are doing well in this reality, using your abilities, helping your husband and caring for your child. You do not need to feel guilty over the creation of any probable selves. They come into reality with problems, but all of you come into reality with challenges that you have set ‘ahead of time.’ You have given them the gift of existence. They will learn how to use it and develop their own abilities in their own way. You have also given them individuality, which means that they are not yourselves, but variations on yourselves.

Many do. You give probable selves a foundation and history and identity, and without your creation of them they would not exist. Would you, then, deny them reality in order to save them from any pain? Now, your headache can vanish. All existence is vulnerable … to the possibilities and probabilities of creation that dwell deeply with it. Even when you thrust a pain apart from yourself and give it as a heritage to a fragment personality, you give it also your creative power and your hopes. You do not set these personalities adrift without hope or potential.

Another student asked, “Do we often project our fears and guilts on to probable personalities?”

You need not do so at all. Once you realize that your guilt is groundless, then it can dissolve. It is only when you become frightened that you project it in such a way.

We mentioned that the dreaming self has its own memories. It has memory of all dream experience. To you, this might mean that it has memory of its past, and, indeed, to you, memory itself is dependent upon a past or the term seems meaningless. To the dreaming self, however, past, present and future do not exist. How can it be said to have memory?

If you would have some idea of what the probable universe is like, then examine your own dreams, looking for those events which do not have any strong resemblance to the physical events of waking existence. Look for dream individuals with whom you are not acquainted in normally conscious life. Look for landscapes that appear bizarre or alien, for all of these exist somewhere. You have perceived them. They do not exist in the space that you know but neither are they nonexistent, mere imaginative toys of the dreaming mind, without substance.

In sleep, not only do you withdraw from the physical field of actuality but you also enter other systems.

I lie down on the porch couch and drift into a light sleep. I discover that I can do a peculiar thing to my brain by somehow tightening the muscles on my scalp and then doing something intense with a sound I can ‘hear.’ The sound holds, and I can feel my astral body shudder inside my physical one. It is as though I’m tearing loose from a Jell-o mold. I get out of my body this way, float above the couch and go back in. I try the same technique, tightening the scalp muscles and feel my astral body stir. This time I get out of my physical body and stand staring at it. The experience is so strange that for a moment I think I’m dead, though I know this isn’t true. I know quite clearly that I am out of my body, experimenting and in no difficulty. So I turn, leave my body behind on the couch and walk out the door and down to the dock outside our house.

I write: ‘Do you breathe water somehow?’ She answers, ‘Yes. They outlawed those suits a number of years ago, so we can’t get to …’ She stops suddenly and I get the idea that once again I’m in some kind of a warp of a probable dimension of submarine people, or people who live in a water-based atmosphere. My mask becomes uncomfortable and begins to fill with some water.

The others become frantic to get out too. We kick to the wall and push through up the fireplace, one by one, to surface. The instant I yank off my mask, I jolt awake. For some time I am disoriented. I find myself sitting on the dock and do not recall walking there. I’m in my physical body now, yet somehow the physical world around me is incomplete with enormous pieces missing. Finally, my head clears; it had been filled with a peculiar whine. It was as though the world outside of the immediate focus of my eyes was only half-formed; the rest, grayish and swirling.

I get upset at this, when the door opens and in walks my old fifth-grade teacher, confused and dazed. ‘What are you doing here?’ I exclaim, and the ‘man’ explains that the connection touched physical reality in several places. My old teacher does not realize what she is doing or where she is, he tells me. Now I become frantic to leave. I hear a bell tinkling and am pulled out the office door, down the corridor, through the cellar, up the stairs to my bed. I awaken.

Seth told us that Rob’s doctor probable self was a Doctor Pietra. As mentioned in my earlier book, we tried to contact him — so far, without success. Some years ago, Rob did do some medical artwork and was astonished at his success. He has no conscious knowledge of wanting to be a doctor as a child, but in painting he always emphasized body structure and form.

But what is the point of all these probable selves? What do they have to do with the development of personality as we think of it? Seth is still discussing probabilities in his own book, so we don’t have all the answers, by any means. One night, Rob asked Seth how our own egos had changed as a result of our sessions, however, and Seth used the question as an opportunity to give us more information about personality and probable selves.

To any of them, the others would seem to exist in a probable universe, yet all are connected. All of you did not have the same parents, for example, and there are portions of probable situations existing in your own parents’ separate lives. [To Rob:] In two probable realities, your mother did not have children. You do not exist in these. In some, she married but not the man you know as father. A psychological connection exists between that first son in that other system and yourself.

In the dream state, the portions of the larger ‘structure’ sometimes communicate in highly codified symbols. It would be highly improbable that you could decipher many of these now. There is a feedback system that operates, and yet you must understand that these other identities are fully independent and individual. They exist in codified psychological structures within your personality, as you do in theirs.

These do not necessarily represent more evolved selves. Certain abilities will be more developed in them than in you, and vice versa. I am not speaking of portions of your self that exist in the ‘future.’ Each probable self, you see, has ‘future’ selves.

The majority of events do not ‘solidify’ until the last moment, in your terms. According to your understanding and interpretation of the word events, none are predestined or predetermined by sources outside of yourselves. Your childhood environment, for example, was determined by you before physical birth. Within this framework, you also give yourself the freedom to manipulate and change. The main events of a civilization are chosen by its people, but because a course is begun, this does not mean that it cannot be changed at any point.