“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane’s face is somehow softer than in the last encounter, and Rob seems more relaxed too. ‘The what?’ Rob asks.

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?’

Jane lights a cigarette and tries to be flippant. ‘Isn’t that funny!’ she says. ‘Just today Rob was on the phone, and had to hang up. He said, “Seth is coming, have to hang up.” Then he didn’t know what he meant. We figured that it was a slip of the tongue of some kind. But we wondered about it.’

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.

The dreaming self is to some considerable degree aware of the probable self. There is give-and-take between the two, for much data is received by the dreaming self from the probable self — the self that experiences what the ego would call probable events.

The probable self can be reached through hypnosis but only with excellent subjects and operators. Often it will not be recognized, however, for there will be no evidence of its experience in physical reality to back up its statements. Its data will agree when considered within its own framework. Reaching it in this manner would be highly difficult in any case. To my knowledge, it has not as yet been reached through hypnosis. It has been glimpsed but not recognized as a separate part of the self — in dream recordings and analytic sessions.

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.

You may not be able to make sense from what appears to be a chaotic jungle of disconnected images and actions. The main reason for your confusion is the inability of an egotistical identity to perceive order that is not based upon continuity of moments. The order within the probable system is based upon something that could be compared to subjective associations or intuitive flashes of insight — experiences that can combine ingredients that could appear to the ego as disconnected. Here they are combined into whole integrated patterns of action.

The probable system does not achieve its order through subjective association, but the term is the nearest I can use to approximate the basic causes for this order. The events within it are, indeed, objective and concrete within their own field of reality, for example. Your own system is real and concrete only within its own field, remember.

A group of us are at my parents’ house, in the cellar, projecting. I look into the furnace room and notice a formation of something like hot water heaters near the ceiling. It elongates and expands into a porcelain corridor. I step into it and meet several strange catlike people who explain that I have projected into a warp of dimensions and entered their reality. It is a probable system where consciousness decided to use the cat form as the most satisfactory and in which the cat walked upright, used tools and so forth.

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.

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.

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.

In your present life, the same process continues. Most of these dreams are very disconnected from the ego and will not be recalled. The self who pursues these divergent paths is actual, however. The doctor you might have been once dreamed of a probable universe in which he would be an artist. He continues to work out his own probabilities. He exists in fact. You call his system an alternate system of probability, but this is precisely what he would call yours.

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.

The ego structure remains, of course. The responsibility of dealing with physical reality remains, but in some respects the nature of this manipulation changes. It becomes more direct. Physical properties are manipulated more and more at a mental level. The ego becomes more like the inner ego and less like its old self, comparatively speaking. It accepts large portions of reality that it previously denied. Structurally, it remains intact, yet it has changed chemically and electromagnetically. Now it is far more open to inner data. Once this freedom is achieved, the ego can never return to its old state.

As each separate identity then seeks to know and experience its other portions, then All That Is learns Who and What It Is. Action never ceases its exploration of itself. All That Is can never know itself completely, since action must always act and each action creates a new unknown. Action must travel through itself from every conceivable point, and yet the journey, being itself action, will create new paths.

There are many you’s in the probable systems, and each You is related psychologically in a personality structure. The You that you know is a part of this. In your system, all the other You’s seem to exist in a probable reality.

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.

Emotional charged feeling immediately sets up what you may think of as a tangent. It is expressed in some reality system. This is the inner nature of action. Those thoughts and desires and impulses not made physically real in your terms will be made real in other systems.

This is what I know of reality. There is far more to be known. Outside of the realities of which I am aware and others are aware, there are systems that we cannot describe. They are massive energy sources, cosmic energy banks, that make possible the whole reality of probabilities.