“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The ego is so strong that it clings even to the new materialization. There are two faces of the same problem, you see. As I am sure you know, your father is not unhappy. You never knew your father. The man who was to have been your father left. This does not mean that you were an orphan in that respect, nor did he leave out of cruelty to you. Give me a moment here.

He left you and he left your brothers something you hold in high regard. Lingering within the man you call your father there was always the sense of the unfinished. There was a feeling of the searcher. There was the need from which creativity springs. In some measure this became your impetus. You sensed it intuitively.

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.

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.

(I walked about a bit while she sat waiting. Finally I sat down at 9:49 and picked up my pen and paper. “Okay,” I said. Jane then murmured my name faintly, her eyes still closed. Another minute passed. Then she resumed at 9:50, and as she did so her eyes began to open as usual, and her manner was again somewhat animated.)

There was a particular time when your father said goodbye to you. You were two.

You were playing. You were on your mother’s lap, in their bedroom, and he said simply “goodbye”, to you both. And you both knew that he meant it. (Jane sat with her head down.) It had followed a quarrel with your mother. He went out of the house and when he returned he was not the same man. Yet you understood subconsciously, and he left in you that moment the desire to create.

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.

He left for your middle brother (smile) a stubborn persistence that will help him if he uses it correctly. He left for your mother the questions she needed—what had she done that she should not have done; for that question was important for her development.

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.)

(Jane remembered the last part of the material. “But I didn’t know what to do at break,” she said. “I was still Seth at break, but I could tell when you got up and moved around, across the light, even with my eyes closed… Everything now is fading away as I talk to you. I felt real funny when the session ended.”

(As we talked Jane said she got something additional from Seth—to the fact that my first cousin, Ruth Butts, was a masculine personality. Jane then said that “days must have passed, as far as time went, for just an hour and a half.”)