“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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?’

In the meantime, one of the other people with Seth speaks with him. One is a large, jolly-looking monk. I also notice that Rob’s back seems much more comfortable than at our first meeting. ‘You’ll go on and develop your own way in this probability system,’ I say. Affection seems to well up among us.

In one dream she seemed to meet a probable self of her own. This was the dream:

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.

Dream One

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.

We swim about the apartment. An older woman comes into the kitchen. She is dressed normally except that her dress is of a strange metallic material. She looks surprised at our costumes, but I see a paper and pen on the kitchen counter and write a brief explanation. She glances at our flippers. I take one off and show her my foot. ‘Just like ours,’ she says, surprised. Her voice is clear but very high-pitched.

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.

The people have orangish faces, pointed ears and very long hair on their heads and hands. They are dressed in dark robes. One ‘man’ and I walk to a complex of offices. This particular room is done in dark wood and leather, with no windows. He tells me that this warp will only exist for a short time, connecting his reality and mine, before it disconnects and that the same situation probably will not happen again. He also tells me that it is difficult to get back.

You may act out many probabilities within dream reality and try out alternatives, and not necessarily short-term ones. You would have made an excellent doctor, for example. In your terms, you worked out this possibility by weaving, over a period of three years, a dream framework in which you learned exactly what your life would have been, had you gone into medicine.

This was more than imaginative. You examined one probability and chose another. The individual, then, chooses which probabilities he desires to actualize physically. In one such episode, for example, you followed your present course through; therefore, you are subconsciously aware of your own ‘future’ — since you chose it. There are always new choices, however. You foresaw the future possibilities within the main choice system.

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.

Now, the inner self is psychologically influenced by these probable personalities, for they represent a whole personality structure or gestalt with which you are utterly unfamiliar. Your psychologists are dealing with a one-dimensional psychology, at their best.

They remain latent within you, and unexpressed in your system. You have their abilities, unused. You remain latent in their personality structures, and your main abilities are unused within their systems. Yet each of you is a part of one self in a multi-dimensional psychological structure.

The nature of any given probable action does not lead to any particular inevitable act. Probabilities expand in terms of value fulfillment. One given act does not necessarily lead, then, to act A, B and C, onward to some concluding action. Instead, it has offshoots in infinite directions, and these have offshoots.

All of these probable systems are open. In your system it seems as if you chose one course, one main line of probabilities, and that is the end of it. In your system, only one ego predominates and you think of yourself as that ego. In other systems, this is not necessarily the case. In some, the inner self is aware of having more than one ego, of playing more than one role at a time. As an analogy, this would be as if you lived, say, the life of a rich man of great talent, the life of a poor man and the life of a mother and career woman. You would be aware of each role and find abilities being developed in each. This is an analogy, and in several respects it could lead you astray if taken too literally. In such a system, there would be no breakup of time, you see. …