“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

He wondered about their mental condition in relation to the overall consciousness. Now. Consciousness can never fully express itself in physical terms, as you know. Through various reincarnations the entity attempts to express itself more and more competently within the framework of physical reality.

In a situation such as your father’s or Miss Callahan’s, the overall consciousness is not less, but less of it expresses itself in physical terms. It either has less and less control over the organism because it has not solved its problems well enough, because it has already largely decided to leave the system, but does so gradually; or because in some instances there is a psychic block, which prevents full utilization of energy in this important regard.

The personality is less and less apparent within the physical organism. The personality itself has not disintegrated. Its control over the organism, for various reasons, has lessened. In these cases the personality gradually makes inroads into the next reality. It gathers its energy within the next system.

Now there is a comparable situation occurring on some occasions in a completely different direction, and for completely different reasons. At birth the past reincarnated self may in some cases refuse or be unable to let go control over physical matter. When this happens there is awareness on the part of the new personality of the old life, but more, a clinging over, a tenacious holding onto, on the part of the previous self.

He left you things to do in your own way. He worked with photography because he could not paint. He could not create himself. He could not see himself in physical surroundings. As the photographer he was often out of the picture. He did not leave you empty-handed.

(Long pause.) He could not materialize. In a sense he was more your passive mother than your father. He could not communicate. His love of machinery was his attempt, his strongest attempt, to make his being physical. The man you call your father is happier now than he has ever been.

This is a voluntary arrangement. The boy needs the additional vitality. I do not believe the boy will live to old age. The father loaned this vitality and helps the boy, knowing beforehand the boy’s difficulty. The boy is unable to relate fully to physical reality. When the man called your father dies his energy will return to the self who is waiting. That self will then call back the energy which it has loaned to Ruth’s son.

Your mother is facing realities she would not face in the past, and seeing in physical terms the results of her own inner actions. There was no other way for her to learn. What may seem a disaster to you in your scrutiny of her life, is a well-learned lesson in reality, and a victory.

Personalities are not static things. Entities are eternal. (Eyes narrowed and dark.) They are not as nicely nor as neatly packaged out, one to a body, as your psychologists believe. They constantly change. They grow. They make decisions. They use the physical body fully, or they partially depart according to their own inner needs and development.

When psychic gestalts are made and formed they are not static. They make different alliances until they find their place in a whole identity that serves their purposes, or are strong enough to become indestructible. They are always becoming, they are not closed units.

Your father was not simply your father. That identity that is his has grown, developed, changed its circumstances and its physical components many times, searching for the psychic soil that will best develop his own potentials.

He did not leave you with no thought. He left you what he thought was the best he had to give you, a need for creativity that he could not express in physical terms. (Long pause, eyes closed, head down.) He left for your young brother a sense (smile) of sweetness, an innocent, untouched quality that will always sustain him.

Now all of this pertains to our main discussion, for the implications are plain. He, in the old-man body, enjoys the solitude that he always wanted. Your mother was originally the spark that made him relate at all to physical reality, and that is why he resented her, why he fought her, and why she could not respect him. He enjoys the luxury now of not reacting, in his terms. (Pause.)

There will be a joyous gathering together of his identity when the body dies. These are like the weaving together of mosaics, the weavings of the personality in and out, and no effect is meaningless nor without benefit. In this life you were meant to create, and teach. All creation is teaching. Your entity is older than your father’s. You and Ruburt and I have been connected many times. The gestalt, the conditions, have in the past been beneficial for us all.