“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

On January 17th, Rob and I tried another experiment together. This time, we decided not to have any “format” or particular plans but to leave ourselves open to whatever might happen. Before long, I began to speak for a personality called Malba Bronson, who told Rob that she had died in South Dakota in 1946 at the age of forty-six. The session lasted for an hour and a half; my voice was halting, with many pauses. I sat there, in the darkened room, hearing the voice as if it came from a great distance, feeling a mild astonishment.

They can be of benefit along certain lines. The validity of their information may be excellent. On the other hand, it may be less than trustworthy at times, simply because their achievement level is not high. If they err, they do so through ignorance.

When the ego becomes overly concerned, it becomes overly conditioned to negative responses. The creative energies build up their thickly-dimensioned pseudo-realities of pain. For a certain amount of time, according to your condition, they automatically create the patterns of fear that belong to the ego.

Dissociation puts the power back where it belongs. Daily methods of dissociation are extremely practical. … You will notice within a few weeks’ time an added energy. So-called impulses on your part are often blocked because you do not consider them practical. But the subconscious knows its own meat and its own sauce and the best means for its nourishment.

When your own personalities are more or less in balance, you have no trouble at all looking out for these creatures and actually reinforcing their existence with residues of your creative and sympathetic powers. In times of psychological stress — or in periods of crises — quite unwittingly you often withhold this strong reinforcement. …

In the cats’ deaths, both inherited the peculiar illness, which was a virus, that killed them. In the case of the first cat, you were able to reinforce its strength and maintain its health for some time. Then you needed your energies for yourselves. The second cat barely enjoyed such reinforcement at all and quickly succumbed. (We’d obtained both kittens from the janitor at the art gallery. Both had the same mother.)

Your dog’s illness was incipient. You could not have maintained his health for many years in any case. I would like to make it clear that animals do have energy to maintain their own health, but this is reinforced as a rule by the vitality of the human beings to whom they may be emotionally attached. The fact is that you were unable to give your dog the added vitality at a time when he needed it most. There is no need to blame yourselves. It was beyond your control at your stage of development then.

(To begin, we sat silently at the board, hands on the pointer. Almost at once, Jane began to hear Seth mentally. After taking a few words through the board, she set it aside, stood up and began to speak for Seth as she paced about the room. Her eyes darkened considerably. At times they seemed to contain no highlights. This was our longest session to date, and at its end we were both weary.)

At times, the ego can hold you in a tight vice, which the dissociation breaks. This is what happened after your exercises. You have been doing very well … in allowing yourself psychic freedom. However, conscious fears cause the ego to tighten its grasp, and some effects of this nature were starting up. This is why I suggested the exercises at this time.

Now, in a deep trance the subject, though fully aware of what is happening in the trance, may remember nothing of it afterward. The awareness of plant life is also somewhat like that of the subject in deep trance. Except for the suggestion and stimulus received by regular natural forces on your plane, the plant life does not bestir itself in other directions. But like the trance subject, our plant is aware. Its other abilities lie unused for the time, and latent, but they are present.

If, for example, our tree bark grew fearful of stormy weather and began to harden itself against the elements, in a well-meaning but distorted protective spirit, then the tree would die. This is what the ego does when it reacts too violently to purely physical data. As a result, it stiffens, and then you have, my well-meaning friend, the cold detachment with which you at one time faced the world.

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.

At times, Joseph, you have not trusted your ego’s ability to protect you. … You have forced it into anxiety so that it overcompensated, trying to protect you, and ended up half choking you to death. Do you want to sit in the rocker?

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.”