“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:43.) Now I have friends even as you do, though my friends may be of longer standing. You must understand that we experience our own reality in quite a different manner than you do. We are aware of what you would call our past selves, those personalities we have adopted in various other existences.

Because we use telepathy we can hide little from each other, even if we wished to. This, I am sure, seems an invasion of privacy to you, and yet I assure you that even now none of your thoughts are hidden, but are known quite clearly to your family and friends — and I may add, unfortunately, to those you consider enemies as well. You are simply not aware of this fact.

Our psychological structure does mean that we can communicate in far more various forms than those with which you are familiar, however. Pretend, for example, that you meet a childhood friend whom you have long forgotten. Now you may have little in common. Yet you may have a fine afternoon’s discussion centered about old teachers and classmates, and establish a certain rapport.

So, when I “meet” another, I may be able to relate to him much better on the basis of a particular past life experience, even though in my “now” we have little in common. We may have known each other, for example, as entirely different people in the fourteenth century, and we may communicate very nicely by discussing those experiences, much as you and your hypothetical childhood friend established rapport by remembering your past.

We will be quite aware that we are ourselves, however — the multidimensional personalities who shared a more or less common environment at one level of our existence. As you will see, this analogy is a rather simple one that will do only for now, because past, present, and future do not really exist in those terms.

Our experience, however, does not include the time divisions with which you are familiar. We have far more friends and associates than you do, simply because we are aware of varying connections in what we call for now “past” incarnations.

We do not feel the need to hide our emotions or thoughts from others, because all of us by now well recognize the cooperative nature of all consciousness and reality, and our part in it. We are highly motivated. (Humorously): Could spirits be anything else?

Now, each whole self, or multidimensional personality, has its own purposes, missions, and creative endeavors that are initial and basic parts of itself and that determine those qualities that make it eternally valid and eternally seeking. We are finally free to utilize our energy in those directions. We face many challenges of quite momentous nature, and we realize that our purposes are not only important in themselves, but for the surprising offshoots that develop in our efforts to pursue them. In working for our purposes, we realize we are blazing trails that can also be used by others.

I communicate with your dimension, for example, not by willing myself to your level of reality, but by imagining myself there. All of my deaths would have been adventures had I realized what I know now. On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough.

Now, in my work as a teacher I travel into many dimensions of existence, even as a traveling professor might give lectures in various states or countries. Here, however, the resemblance ends, largely, since before I can begin to work I must set up preliminary psychological structures and learn to know my pupils before teaching can even begin.

(Jane’s delivery was quite a bit slower now.)

(Pause at 10:51.) The problems vary according to the system in which my pupil has his or her existence. In your system, for example, and in connection with the woman through whom I now write this book, initial contact on my part was made long before our sessions began.

(Long pause at 11:01. In 1957, after Jane had sold her first few short stories, she was invited to a conference of science fiction writers at Milford, Pennsylvania. I couldn’t go because of my own work, so Jane attended the conference with Cyril Kornbluth [now deceased], a friend and a well-known writer who lived near our home in Sayre, Pennsylvania.

Now: We will continue our book at our next session.

And now I bid you good evening.