“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To some extent Ruburt has identified with him. He was after all Ruburt’s mother’s father, and therefore the source out of which Ruburt’s mother came—the higher power, so to speak. The ape emotionally represented the instincts in true light, as dependable, supportive, and as the basis for earthly existence. Ruburt as an infant, then, experienced the strength of the earthly source. This means that he is to trust his instincts as far as letters are concerned, or healing, or whatever. At the same time the ape male and female represents the sexual quality of the earth, male and female being simply other versions of each other. This automatically helps resolve certain conflicts Ruburt had involving male-female identifications. In other terms the past was altered, in that Ruburt now experienced the yearned-for mother love that was warm in its animal female understanding, supportive and strong enough to easily bear a child’s small ragings and hatreds.

It was not necessarily a negative identification. That negative quality emerged only when he felt the need for greater protection, when he threatened to become uncivilized—going against his society in unforeseen ways. When he became important at all in world terms, he could no longer be a pygmy, and therefore lost a part of that identification that he felt had protected him against his mother and the feared spontaneity or instincts. So he would become shorter.

(I protested, saying that I hoped she wouldn’t “say something now that I’ll wish later I’d written down.” For one of the few times during these sessions, I refused to pick up my pen and notebook. Even though Jane repeated that she was willing to give the material. She needed the rest. Seth of course had no problems; he was all set to go.

(“All right then,” Jane said finally, “I’ll just tell you this: Our whole idea of reincarnation is all screwed up. To untangle it would be really confusing. The notion of one life at a time, in any time period, is bullshit—the psyche is so rich that it can have more than one life at a time—like your Nabene and Roman lives together, in the first century A.D. But if you tell people that you’ll get them all confused....”