“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Without taking into account here the essences of other life forms, do I think the human personality survives physical death? Considering the loving, passionate “work” that Jane and I engaged in for more than twenty years, of course I do. No other answer makes intuitive or consciously reasonable sense to me. I think it quite psychologically and psychically limiting to believe otherwise, for such beliefs can only impede or postpone our further conscious understanding of the individual and mass realities — the overall “nature” — we’re creating. I think that all of us seek answers, and that our searches are expressed in our very lives.

October 13, 1984. Jane has been dead for thirty-eight days. It has finally come to me that the dark tunnels of those streets I run on, with their mysterious implications of the unknown, and the fear of the dark that such streets can generate, are physically oriented metaphors for the transition Jane has made to another reality. In our terms, the tunnel shapes lead to an unfathomable new reality that is supposedly filled with the light of the universe. That light is symbolized by the streetlights shining through the tunnels every so often, and hinting at that great brilliant reality beyond. This metaphor is particularly apropos at this time, with the trees still carrying their thick growth of leaves — yet later in the fall it may become even more applicable as the leaves drop and the streetlights, poor as they may be in comparison to the light of the universe, can shine through a little more brilliantly.

In those terms I have my own proofs of survival, just as Jane had — and as she still does. We always had far too many questions about such matters to be satisfied with the very restrictive “answers” that our religious and secular establishments offer. I cannot believe that in matters of life and death my psyche would be so foolish as to indulge in wish fulfillment, relaying to me only those ideas it “thinks” I want to consciously know. Each time I may feel my own ignorance about even our own physical reality, let alone other realities, I fall back upon my own feelings and beliefs. I have nowhere else to turn, really, nor did Jane. As Seth told us in a number of ways (and to some extent I’m certainly paraphrasing him here), “Never accept a theory that contradicts your own experience.” Jane and I found much better answers for ourselves, even if they were — and are — only approximations of more basic, and perhaps even incomprehensible, truths. My unimpeded, creative psyche intuitively knows that positive answers to its questions exist, that otherwise it wouldn’t bother to ask those questions within nature’s marvelous framework, that nature is alive and, as best we can sensually conceive of it, eternal. My psyche knows that it makes no sense within nature’s context for the human personality to be obliterated upon physical death.

‘The appearance of the old house stands for our ordinary physical reality — but its high location and closed shutters prevent me from looking inside it, into another reality; the negligee represents my knowledge that Jane is in that new dimension. Our meeting is her message to me that she is well, rejuvenated, with her abilities and personality intact after her death. My reluctance to fully return her hugs is a sign that I’m not yet ready to join her. Her youth also stands for the plasticity of time.

[...] The inner senses deal with realities beneath camouflage … and deliver inner information. [...] As the senses of sight, sound and smell appear to reach outward, bringing data to the body from an outside observable camouflage pattern, so the inside senses seem to extend far inward, bringing inner reality data to the body. [...]

The elements — those that you now know and those you will create — are camouflages of the basic stuff or vitality which you cannot discover with your outer senses. [...]

[...] The painting, however, achieves a certain freedom from camouflage, although it cannot escape it, and actually hovers between realities in a way that no thoroughly camouflaged object could do. [...]

[...] And while they create instruments to deal with smaller and smaller particles, they will see smaller and smaller particles, seemingly without end. [...]

At the precise time of Ruburt’s dream, Miss Cunningham was deciding to leave this plane of reality. [...]

[...] But beyond this, Miss Cunningham’s present personality has been gently disentangling itself from this plane of reality — and she simply did not remember him.

[...] She is focusing less and less in this plane of reality, and again, gradually, she will begin to focus in another. [...]

[...] Every time I passed it, I wondered again: Was she transferring her consciousness to another level of reality? [...]

[...] The material is included because of its importance in understanding the later concepts on dream reality and the methods of perceiving inner data.

(In an earlier session, Seth said that while on vacation in Maine, we both unwittingly created two images — versions of ourselves — and then reacted to them. [...]

In your York Beach experience, had you not been able to form those images outside of yourselves, and so endow them with some physical reality, you might very well have turned yourself into schizophrenic personalities instead.

Many people are unable to endow fragments with such physical reality, and thus shove them more or less harmlessly away at arm’s length, as you did. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] Then these materializations of panic and pain play about the physical body, projected by the ego, and steal the powers of the subconscious mind from their natural constructive tasks.… In other words, the ego becomes a tool to disrupt rather than to create.

[...] In prehistoric times, mankind evolved the ego to help him deal with camouflage patterns that he had, himself, created. [...] The inner senses led him into a reality he could not manipulate as easily as he could physical camouflage, and he feared what he thought of as a loss of mastery.

Psychological time is so a part of inner reality that even though the inner self is still connected to the body, you are, in the dream framework, free of some very important physical effects. [...]

[...] … A proper use of psychological time will not only lead you to inner reality but will prevent you from being rushed in the physical world. [...]

[...] You will discover that ‘inner time’ is as much a reality as you once considered outer time to be. [...]