“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Considering Rob’s and my relationship — the challenges, joys, hopes, strains and our own personality characteristics. Maybe the whole thing is — reacting to ourselves individually and to the other person — experiencing our own personal reactions and then reacting to them — then reacting to the other person who experiences the same processes in himself. We … creatively keep altering ourselves and our mates. We can’t be ‘perfect’ at the start because the processes include changing events. There’s bound to be some lopsidedness to our growth, as we form psychological ‘art’ throughout our entire lives — or learn to live … artistically. Each person in such a relationship changes constantly in relationship to himself and the other person, until — hopefully? — by death you’ve used the characteristics of your own personality the best you can. Merged them with your mate’s so that between the two of you, you get a new creative mixture in a kind of psychological multiplication … You try different ways of using your own traits, etc.

How Seth, Dreams … eventually came to be issued by Stillpoint Publishing, how it can even be thought of as a “lost manuscript,” makes a most interesting account that I’ll just outline here. First, though, I remind the reader that Jane spoke in a trance or dissociated state for a discarnate personality who calls himself Seth; by his own definition he’s an “energy personality essence,” no longer focused within physical reality. Last July my agent, Tam Mossman, phoned to ask that I search Jane’s papers for a manuscript he remembers her submitting to him some seventeen years ago, when he had been a young editor just beginning a career with Prentice-Hall. That manuscript is Seth, Dreams and Projection of Consciousness. As soon as he’d reviewed it back then, Tam had asked Jane to do a book on Seth himself. The result? The Seth Material, for which Jane signed a contract in December 1968. The book came out in 1970; and in it she had used certain portions of Seth, Dreams …

(See the considerable world-view material from Jane and from Seth in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. A world view is the body of an individual’s personalized interpretation of the physical universe; emotions are necessarily involved. “Each person has such a world view,” Seth tells us in Session 718, “whether living or dead in your terms, and that ‘living picture’ exists despite time or space. It can be perceived by others.”)

Seth remarked many times that each person sends out invisible signals of need and desire that are picked up and reacted to by those who have similar challenges. In our own case, Jane and I were always acutely aware of the difficult personal working-out of the interchanges that followed our getting together. Here are her rough notes for September 29, 1976, just as she wrote them in her journal.

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.

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. [...]

[...] 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. [...] 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.”

[...] 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.

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. [...] So I simply adopt another personality to tell you so. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] It is a waiting plane for personalities at certain stages of development.

Your own subconscious is the fountain of your individuality and personality; from it springs your talent. [...]

[...] Portions of it deal with camouflage patterns, with the personal past of the present personality, with racial memory. [...]

But I still couldn’t quite believe in personal life after death. [...]

[...] Instruments may be used to force imagination to move along in terms of its owner’s personal memories, but it cannot be forced to move along the lines of conceptual thoughts because the imagination is a connective between the physical individual and the nonphysical entity.

[...] When you or Ruburt wonder if this material comes from your subconscious, you take it for granted that the subconscious is personal, dealing exclusively with matters of your past. [...]

[...] The unwillingness on Miss Cunningham’s part represented her present personality’s protest against the change that a deeper part of herself deemed necessary and proper.

[...] 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.

[...] … The disentanglement of her personality has been gentle and gradual. [...]

[...] The new personality is not entirely focused, and it must make immediate critical adjustments of the strongest nature. [...]

Actually, the dominant personality, in your terms, can be compared to the dominant entity. [...] 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.

Schizophrenia is caused by a personality fragment that is broken off, so to speak, from the primary acting personality, operating often in direct opposition to it, but in any case, operating as a secondary personality.

[...] But these dream images work for the entity as a whole and serve as a means for the various personalities to communicate; that is, in many cases, the previous personalities communicate with the present one. This is a means of acquainting the present personality with its ‘past’ and also of reminding it of its goals, without disturbing the blatant awake ego.

[...] Instead, the dissociated part of the personality dons another personality and battles with the dominant one for control. [...]

[...] That is, both of you have pursued separate abilities because of the bent of your particular personalities.

[...] Some things about a personality never change!

(Excerpts from Session 23, Wednesday, February 5, 1964, 9:00 P.M.)
(The first section of the session dealt with
personal reincarnation material.)

[...] It would seem ludicrous to suppose that such a vital matter as breathing would be left to a subordinate, almost completely divorced, poor-relative sort of a lesser personality.

Actually, the board first gave a few messages from a personality called Frank Withers, who insisted that he had known our neighbor, Miss Cunningham. [...]