“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Mark sat there, considerably startled. I was in trance, of course, but, knowing him, I can well imagine how he must have stared at me as I strode back and forth speaking in that deep Seth voice and talking to Rob in such a manner. When Rob explained briefly about Seth before the session, he’d asked Mark questions he’d like answered. Mark said that he was interested in the connection between consciousness and evolution. Now, almost immediately, Seth said:

I want to reply to your friend’s question. … When he asked it, he was referring to the point at which self-consciousness entered into so-called inert form. You know, now, that all form has consciousness, and so there was no point at which self-consciousness entered with the sound of trumpets, so to speak. Consciousness was inherent in the first materialization upon your plane.

Self-consciousness entered in very shortly after but not what you are pleased to call human self-consciousness. I do not like to wound your egos in this manner, and I can hear you yell ‘foul,’ but there is no actual differentiation between the various kinds of consciousness.

You are either conscious of self or you are not. A tree is conscious of itself as a tree. It does not consider itself as a rock. A dog knows it is not a cat. What I am trying to point out here is this supreme egotistical presumption that self-consciousness must of necessity involve humanity per se. It does not.

So-called human consciousness did not suddenly appear. Our poor maligned friend, the ape, did not suddenly beat his hairy chest in exultation and cry, ‘I am a man.’ The beginnings of human consciousness, on the other hand, began as soon as multi-cellular groupings began to form in field patterns of a certain complexity.

While there was no specific entry point as far as human consciousness was concerned, there was a point (in your terms) where it did not seem to exist. The consciousness of being human was fully developed in the caveman, of course, but the human conception was alive in the fish.

We have spoken of mental genes. These are more or less psychic blueprints for physical matter, and in these mental genes existed the pattern for your human type of self-consciousness. It did not appear in constructed form for a long period. …

Human self-consciousness existed in psychological time, and in inner ‘time’ long before you, as a species, constructed it. For your friend’s sake, I will say this as simply as possible: Human consciousness was inherent and latent from the beginning of your physical universe. I suggest a brief break, and do not crack up into pieces. I give you this slight evidence of my humor, Joseph, simply to show you that I am not, after all, one to carry grudges.

“Seth answered each question I had the minute it came to mind,” he said. “Rob gave me a piece of paper. I intended to write questions down as I thought of them, but I never got the chance to do it. He answered them in order.” He shook his head. “Seth did. Or you did. Somebody did. I’ve never heard or seen anything like this!”

Humanity’s so-called supreme blossom seems to be the ego, which can be, at times, a poisoning blossom, indeed. There is nothing wrong with the ego. The point remains, however, that man became so fascinated with it that he has ignored the parts of himself that make the ego possible, and he ignores those portions of himself that give to the ego the very powers of which he is so consciously proud. …

But that night, Mark insisted that Seth had read his mind and listened spellbound as Seth told him about the inner senses. None of us suspected that Seth would give Mark detailed information about the inner organization for which he worked, or help him understand personal problems, or delight in telling him what had gone on at sales conferences that Mark had already attended — or with a great rush of humor tell him the exact amount of a new raise he had just been given. All of that was in the future.

It was midnight before the session ended. After it was over, and our salesman friend left for his motel in a nearby town, Seth came through with a few personal remarks for Rob. We had already gone into the bedroom when I felt drawn to go out into the front room to my desk. Standing there, silently, I felt Seth near. My mind was a whirl. I knew that I felt that Seth was near, but, intellectually, I was full of questions. Had Seth really read Mark’s mind, or had Mark just wanted that to happen and convinced himself that it had? Did I feel Seth, or was I indulging in fantasies of a highly dangerous nature?

I did a lot of thinking in the next few days. As I worked at the gallery or at my book or did my house chores, the last session kept coming to mind. If Seth had read Mark’s mind, this was an excellent progression. If not, then Mark had deceived himself, and Seth had gone along and taken advantage of the deception. And if Seth was a personification of my subconscious, then this would be an excellent example of subconscious fraud.

“It’s easy enough for you to talk,” I retorted. “I don’t particularly mind a mischievous subconscious, but a deceptive one is something else again.”

“No. But even though I think telepathy is possible … I can’t quite believe that in a trance state, through me, another personality read someone else’s mind — that’s it!” I said. “I’ve put my finger on it. Besides, I didn’t like Seth taking you to task in front of Mark. And that made me question if I was really far more disturbed than I think I was because you didn’t help with Miss Cunningham the other night. What a beautiful and sneaky thing to do! Have a secondary personality give you the dickens over it — and in front of company — with me supposedly in the clear, taking no responsibility for it at all.”

During the next days, I regained my positive frame of mind. Several times, flashes of concepts came to me while I was house-cleaning — sudden intrusive patterns of thought accompanied by a feeling of intellectual and emotional illumination. I felt at these times as if new information was being “popped into my head,” or rather, into my whole being. And I knew that, mentally, I only retained a part of it. These experiences made me accept the telepathy episode in the last session, though I still wasn’t sure of the agent involved.

That ability is also growing on your part, Joseph, and with you, it will involve visionary data, as you call it. And another word about our material; Ruburt’s mind is an excellent one and well given to serve our ends at this time. There is a reciprocal agreement here, a give and take, quite different from your friend’s idea of psychological invasion.

Indeed. One reason for the success of our communications is the peculiar abilities in both of you and the interaction between them — and the use you let me make of them. Ruburt’s intellect had to be of high quality. His subconscious and conscious mind had to be acquainted with certain ideas to begin with, in order for the complexity of this material to come through.

Material like this is sifted through many layers of subconscious conceptions and is subsequently colored to some degree. People believing strongly in your organized religions often color the material in highly disadvantageous ways. Ruburt’s mind is much like my own, though if you’ll forgive me, in a very limited fashion. Therefore the distortions are much less harmful, more easily discovered and cleared. I suggest you break.

In my operations in your plane, I must use the materials at hand, but despite any ideas to the contrary, this involves a give and take … Ruburt’s “Idea Construction” was rather amazing under the circumstances. The inner senses provided him with much, but the manuscript itself [as written up] also represented an achievement of the conscious mind. I was drawn by this to realize that you were ready for me.

You are so consciously aware of your own needs for privacy, Joseph, that Ruburt’s strong but mostly unconscious needs in these directions sometimes go unsatisfied, since he is not aware of them. … You are both very much alike beneath the obvious differences, but Ruburt’s largely unrecognized needs along these lines are important. … He holds and collects his psychic energy, and without knowing it, he does not like it to ‘bleed’ outward. The illusion of an entryway — an inner hall — would serve these ends. This is merely a suggestion.

“Well, okay, ever onward,” I said, because despite it all, I felt it foolish to look a gift horse in the mouth. I also felt that in each of us there is a deep connection with “magical” elements of our nature—magical in that they rise like poetic inspiration, filling the mundane world with a special living, personal meaning. To refuse such “gifts” from the “gods” might be far more dangerous than accepting them. These thoughts were far beneath my conscious ones, though. Only now, writing this book, did I recall entertaining them.

To a different degree, it is filled with conscious semi-personalities. They are not [as a rule] as developed as you are, as you are not as developed as your entity is. That dream world experiences its own continuity. It is not aware of any break, for example, when you are waking. It does not know if you sleep or wake. It merely exists to a fairly vivid degree while you dream or sleep, and it sleeps but does not ‘die’ when you waken. …

The entity itself does not have to keep constant track of its personalities because each one possesses an inner self-conscious part that knows its origin. This part, for now, I will call the self-conscious beyond the subconscious. … I mentioned that some part of you knows exactly how much oxygen the lungs breathe, and this is the part of which I spoke. It also receives all inner data.

This portion of the personality translates inner data and sifts it through the subconscious, which is a barrier and also a threshold to the present personality. I told you also that the topmost layers of the subconscious contain personal memories and beneath — racial memory. The personality is not actually layered, of course, but continuing with the necessary analogy, beneath the racial memories you look out upon another dimension of reality with the face of this other self-conscious part of you.

This portion is ‘turned toward’ the entity. When such abilities as telepathy are used, this function is carried on continually by this other self-conscious part of you. But as a rule, you act upon such data without the knowledge of the ordinary conscious self.

There is also a corresponding, but ‘lesser’ self-consciousness that connects your present personalities with the dream world, which is aware of its origin and communicates data from you to dream reality. …

It was in this session that Seth made the analogy of the “weird creature with two faces,” one turned to physical reality and one to inner reality, both conscious and aware, each representing one facet of our consciousness.

I was going to mention the furniture arrangements that we embarked upon during this time but find that a few excerpts from this same session give a pretty fair picture. They are pertinent for several reasons. Seth seemed to know how we could best utilize our surroundings to serve conscious and unconscious needs. We’d been in the apartment three years when the sessions began, yet in a few session comments Seth managed to clear up several points that we had had never settled.