“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The drawing is very good. There were three beds in that room. Dick slept in one, the bed that you have pictured. His eldest sister slept in another, and a young brother in the third. There was also a smaller bed in which a maid slept. The family was not rich by any means. The maid was a relative of Throckmorton’s. In the beginning she worked for the family to save a decent dowry. However she was no beauty, and Throckmorton never really managed to pay her much above food and lodging.

(I did not have time to say it here, but when I did the sketch I had the feeling that there might be more than the one bed in the room. But these I could not see. I also had the thought that I’d probably made the room look too spacious for the times.)

Behind the shop was another room that served as a kitchen and, you might say, parlor. In any case it was the family’s social room. Behind this was a storeroom with earthen floor, and a shed. An imbecilic boy sometimes did errands for Throckmorton about the shop. He slept in the shed. Lessie had already had and lost 4 children. One actually lived to be 18 and was born when Lessie was very young. The others died in childbirth or in the first year. Throckmorton had wanted a son to carry on his shop. The child who died at 18 would have been such a boy, and Throckmorton never really recovered from the lad’s death. He died incidentally of pneumonia: took sick and died within three days.

The son who did survive, you do not know in your present existence. Throckmorton however is your present father. One of the side chores he has taken upon himself is to do reparation to the eldest daughter, obviously, taking her as his wife in this existence. However she holds strong resentment against him from that earlier treatment.

Her clothes were hand-me-downs from the daughter of the family, and since the maid was quite a few years younger than the daughter the clothes fit her poorly. She was glad to see the dissension between the father and the daughter. This time the present personality of the maid tries to make up for the jealousy, and for many quarrels that she initiated secretly between Throckmorton and his daughter, by malicious tattling and playing one member of the family against the other. I suggest you take a brief break, if this material hasn’t already broken you up.

The reason that Dick has had the same father twice is simply that he died at such a young age, before the relationship could be worked out between the two. Dick’s wife was also alive in England during Dick’s short life. She was the daughter of a baker who lived across the street, and was one of the boy’s playmates. The two children were very fond of each other. Both with warm and sunny dispositions. They were attracted to each other at that time, and renewed that relationship in this existence.

There was choice also on her part, that is, they chose to be reborn at approximately the same time so that their ages made them contemporaries. In many cases such as this, one or the other waits a longer period of time, being born as a child to the other party. These things fit together very tightly. They are interwoven, and yet loosely applied.

If your mother or father found continued life together completely unbearable, which incidentally they do not, then in all likelihood one of their entities would suggest through the inner senses that the relationship be discontinued. If the advice was not heeded, and as the situation grew worse, a danger point would arise beyond which the personalities could not safely continue their association.

After this point was passed, and all inner warnings went unheeded, then to one or another, little by little, or perhaps in flashes, clear pictures from the past would rush to the personality who was no longer strong enough to hold them back. Almost instantly the present ego of the personality concerned would set up countermeasures against what it would consider an invasion. The past’s inner data would be turned into delusions, fantasies and so forth.

That is the analogy. In actuality the mind is but a portion of the entity which looks out for the personality on the camouflage plane. Your guardian angel legends and such refer to this part of the entity, which is the mind and which is attached to the present personality during this particular existence. The mind helps to keep the personality from going too far astray. I use the term personality to include the whole person. I use it to express the entirety manifested in physical form, in one life.

(In the light of what follows, this might seem to be an unfortunate question. But while taking Jane’s dictation, I have discovered that while concentrating on recording every word, it is easy to lose the sense of what one is putting down. I had, for instance, no clear recollection of what Seth had just said.)

I made a remark, after sessions I’m afraid, to Ruburt one evening—I couldn’t resist—to the effect that you would both be better off if you would think in terms of your entities. Do not think of your entities as foreign alien individuals ready to gobble you up. Even though I speak jokingly of assimilating my poor Frank Watts, this is not the case at all.

He merely moved in the circle, the outer circle, of your acquaintance at that time. There is no reason in particular why you met him this time, except for this sense of familiarity. It does not follow, in other words, that everyone with which you are concerned involved themselves with you in past lives. You always meet completely new and different personalities in various existences as well as old ones. Many times in fact you solve problems that arose with certain personalities by helping other personalities in other lives.

There are laws of a sort that govern these matters. But you can mark my words: In one way or another, all debts are paid. These so-called debts are actually challenges to the particular personalities involved. The word debt implies guilt, and such a connotation is not my intention.

No potentiality is ever ignored, but given full opportunity to use its abilities. Not only does such a potential depend upon inherent abilities, but also upon a facility to use energy and to gather it together in one field as a unit.

Upon this depends, to a large extent, the strength of any sort of a fragment, and this ability as much as any other is a limiting factor also. This is a matter into which we have not yet gone. It is nevertheless important, and one of the basics with which some of our later sessions will be concerned.