“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the next session the following night, Seth launched into the nature of my last trance experience and used it as a stepping stone for his first real discussion of the nature of human personality. As the session shows, Seth apparently decided that it was time to take me in hand. From here on, he would continue to comment on my trance experiments and teach me to regulate them.

The fact that you slipped so easily into this frame should remind you of abilities that you had at one time in another life; then you misused them. But without their previous experience, you would not have entered such a state so quickly, with so little knowledge and preparation. When I mentioned homework, I was not thinking of anything so strenuous …

Actually, the dominant personality, in your terms, can be compared to the dominant entity. Please understand that I am using an analogy here. As the personality on your plane actually changes, expands and grows to its potentialities, as it presents at various times varied images to the world (such as — if you’ll forgive me for using cliches — a smiling face, a sorrowful face), but is still basically the same personality, so on another level does the entity present at various times a varied appearance and speak in a different voice. As the smiling and sorrowful faces also express and expand the personality, so, too, do the various reincarnated personalities express and expand the entity as a whole.

Now, there are various types of dreams and dream fragments. I will follow this through later on, since in these beginning sessions I am giving you what may be considered as a broad outline to be filled in. These dissociated states often occur in sleep, when the ego is quieted. At such times it is very possible for your present personalities to be visited by others such as myself, but only on the bidding of the entity.

The cat focuses upon one thing at a time even though it has no strong ego. So Jane concentrates while I give her the messages, even though it is not the ego which is concentrating. You get a subconscious focus different in many ways from conscious concentration. In this state the attention is focused inward rather than outward, and it is the inner rather than the outer senses that are being exercised. The cat is doing the same thing, in his way, that Jane is. Its inner senses were focused in my direction.

Because mental enzymes seem to give the same effects most of the time in your system, your scientists blithely label these as laws of nature; that is, the apparent laws of cause and effect. If you’ll forgive a pun, because a certain cause will usually give a certain effect in your physical universe, you may be justified in saying that the apparent results are laws that operate within your system. But stay in your own back yard.

(Break at 9:45. Jane and I were both surprised at the amount of material delivered in forty-five minutes; the time seemed to fly. During break, I mentioned to Jane that I would like to ask Seth to say something about flying saucers. Resume at 9:51 P.M.)

What he sees is something between a horse and a dog and resembles neither. The craft retains what it can of its original structure and changes what it must. This accounts for much of the conflicting reports as to shape, size and color. The few times that the craft shoots off at right angles, it has managed to retain functions ordinary to it in its particular habitat.

I do not believe you will have any saucer landings for quite some while — not physical landings in the usual sense of the word. These saucers cannot stay on your plane for any length of time. The pressures that push against the vehicle itself are tremendous. It is literally caught between two worlds. To conform to the laws of a particular plane is a practical necessity, and at this time, the ‘saucers’ cannot afford to stay betwixt and between for any indefinite period.

A plane is not necessarily a planet. A plane may be one planet, but a plane may also exist where no planet is. One planet may have several planes. Planes may also involve various aspects of apparent time. Planes can and do intermix without the knowledge of the inhabitants. A plane may be a time … or only one iota of vitality that exists by itself. A plane may cease to be. A plane is formed for entities as patterns for fulfillment along various lines. It is a climate conducive to the development of unique and particular capabilities and achievements … an isolation of elements.

It is often practical that entities or their various personalities visit one plane before another. This does not mean that one plane must necessarily be visited before another. … You could say also that an entity visits all planes simultaneously, as it is possible for you to visit one particular state, county and city at one time. Also, you might visit the state of sorrow and joy almost simultaneously and experience both emotions in heightened form because of the almost immediate contrast. In fact, the analogy of a plane with an emotional state is much more valid than the analogy between a plane and a geographical state, particularly since emotional states take up no room or space. …

We didn’t realize it at the time, but in these early sessions, Seth was gently leading us down the “garden path” — it became more difficult to think of the world in the usual terms, for example. Even though I had come to no conclusions as to what Seth was or wasn’t, the Seth material itself fascinated me. Its source in Seth made it only too clear that other channels of information and experience were open to us beside those we had known earlier.

As a result of the following sessions, for instance, we began “testing” physical reality for its subjective yields. We no longer took for granted the normal day with its succession of moments. Instead, we tried looking at time itself in a new way, practically speaking. We tried to experience it differently, particularly after the nineteenth session and an experiment in self-hypnosis that Rob tried on his own.