“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“She didn’t say you had to. Only that you could if you wanted to. See what Seth has to say about Malba in our next session. I’ll ask him to comment, if he doesn’t on his own.”

The entire session ran three hours, and most of it was devoted to the ego and the subconscious and to their relationship to health and illness. While Rob’s back was vastly improved since Seth’s reincarnational sessions for him, he still had some bad days now and then. We’d been in the habit of blaming difficulties on the subconscious.

“No, I’m O. K.” Rob said. We’d purchased the rocker earlier when Rob’s back was bothering him badly. Rob told me later that he was squirming some, as I paced back and forth, delivering this material as Seth.

Man’s ego causes him to interpret everything else in light of himself. He loses much in this manner. The ego can be compared to the bark of a tree. The bark is flexible, vibrant, and grows with the growth beneath. It is a tree’s contact with the outer world, the tree’s interpreter and, to some degree, the tree’s companion. So should man’s ego be.

Nevertheless, lest Ruburt thinks he is getting off scott free, let me remind him that the tree’s bark is quite necessary and cannot be dispensed with. But I will get into that, and into Ruburt, at a later time. Take a break, and then I will have more to say about the bark that barks too loudly.

Much of the session had been directed to him. He sat, taking notes, as Seth dictated, stopping now and then to stare at him as he made a point. The session continued until nearly 1:00 A.M. The rest of it went into an analysis of the previous ten years, and was directed at both of us. All of this was fascinating, incidentally, and full of psychological insight that greatly helped us both.

But when I read the session, I thought of Rob sitting there, listening to what I thought of as criticism, while his wife paced the room “telling him off” in another voice and supposedly for another, invisible personality. “I worry that it’s just a psychological trick,” I said. “I mean, suppose that’s really what I think, subconsciously — the idea that your ego is too rigid at times and closes you off. So I simply adopt another personality to tell you so. Then I wouldn’t be responsible and you couldn’t talk back.”