“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I delight in astounding the present personalities of old acquaintances by letting them know we have known each other before. It is a failing of mine, but I enjoy it. … There are many times that our paths have crossed, and that is why I wanted you here and why you happened onto the art gallery where Ruburt is employed. Not that free will is not involved, because it is. Only that old friends have a way of meeting. And I was not joking when I spoke earlier of your having a predisposition to gout; for you have also been lecherous in your way.

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?

“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.”

In the beginning particularly, there is always a distortion of such material by the person who receives it. So a person whose personal prejudices are at a minimum is excellent. Ruburt’s prejudices happen to lie along lines which do not contradict what I know to be true — so much the better — and there is less resistance.

There must, of necessity however, be some distortion. If our communication involved invasion, then there would be no distortion because the person so ‘invaded’ would be blotted — out and this is not possible.

The letter upset me considerably, yet it also objectified some of my own doubts. They were out in the air where I could at least deal with them. As far as we could tell, for all of my stewing and hemming and hawing, there were no alarming changes in my personality. I was doing twice the creative work I had done earlier. I was satisfied with the quality of the Seth Material; it was far superior to anything I could do on my own. If nothing else, I thought the sessions presented a way of making deeply unconscious knowledge available on a consistent basis.

In the meantime, we held our twenty-eighth session. In it, Seth assured us that the sessions were constructive and made many comments quoted in The Seth Material about the nature of the subconscious, repeating that he was an independent personality.

There is no danger of dissociation grabbing ahold of Ruburt like some black vague and furry monster, carrying him away to the netherlands of hysteria, schizophrenia or insanity. I have consistently advised contacts with the world at large and advised you both to use your abilities to meet outside challenges. Withdrawal into dissociation as a hiding place from the world could, of course, have dire consequences. Certain personalities could and have fallen prey here, but with you this is not the case. …

“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.

Still, I didn’t know what to make of the material Seth gave us on dreams and the personality that night. Was it symbolically true or practically true or both? When it was typed, we both read it over several times. We were to discover that the dream universe was far more valid than we had ever supposed, but what Seth said then sounded like nothing we had ever read or heard before.

In a dream, I have said, you can experience many days while no corresponding amount of physical time passes. It seems as if you travel very far in the flicker of an eyelash. Now, condensed time is the time felt by the entity, while any of its given personalities live on a plane of physical materialization. To go into this further, many have said that life was a dream. They were true to the facts in one regard, yet far afield as far as the main issue is concerned.

The life of any given individual could be legitimately compared to the dream of an entity. While the individual suffers and enjoys his given number of years, these years are but a flash to the entity. The entity is concerned with them in the same way that you are concerned with your dreams. As you give inner purpose and organization to your dreams, and as you obtain insight and satisfaction from them, though they involve only a portion of your life, so the entity to some extent directs and gives purpose and organization to his personalities. So does the entity obtain insights and satisfactions from its existing personalities, although no one of them takes up all of its attention.

And as your dreams originate with you, rise from you, attain a seeming independence and have their ending with you, so do the entity’s personalities arise from him, attain various degrees of independence and return to him while never leaving him for an instant.

You are familiar through your reading with so-called secondary personalities. Now, this idea comes close to the relationship between the entity and its personalities. They are independent to various degrees, and they operate on various planes of existence for purposes of overall fulfillment and development.

To a lesser degree, you function along these lines in varying roles when you exist simultaneously as a member of a family, a community and a nation and as an artist or writer. As you attempt to use your abilities, so does the entity use its abilities, and he organizes his various personalities and, to some extent, directs their activities while still allowing them what you could call free will. …

The dream world has its own reality, its own ‘time’ and its own inner organization. As the entity is only partially concerned with its personalities after setting them into motion, so you are unconcerned with this dream world after you have set it into motion. But it exists.

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.

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. …