“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“I feel a strong responsibility for you and for any results coming from our communications. If anything, the personal advice I have given you both should add to your mental and emotional balance and result in a stronger relationship with the outside world. … I do depend upon Ruburt’s willingness to dissociate. There is no doubt that he is unaware at times of his surroundings during sessions. It is a phenomenon in which he gives consent, and he could, at any time, return his conscious attention to his physical environment.

“For one thing, Ruburt’s ego is extremely strong. His intuition is the gateway that relaxes an otherwise stubborn and domineering ego.” At this, Rob looked up and laughed. “The intuitive qualities, however, are not frivolous and the personality is well integrated.” Seth went on to describe dissociation, saying that I was always aware of my surroundings to some degree in sessions. “It is true,” he said, “that a state of dissociation is necessary. But because you open a door, this does not mean that you cannot close it, nor does it mean that you cannot have two doors open at once, and this is my point. You can have two doors open at once, and you can listen to two channels at once. In the meantime you must turn down the volume of the first channel while you learn to attune your attention to the second. This process you call dissociation.”

“We have gone into this before,” Seth said, “and I have no doubt that we will on endless occasions; and if I succeed in convincing you of my reality as a separate personality, I will have done exceedingly well. It should be apparent that my communications come through Ruburt’s subconscious. But as a fish swims through water, but the fish is not the water, I am not Ruburt’s subconscious.

“Please be frank, as I do not like this hanging over our heads,” Seth said. Then he went on to give us some information concerning entities and the various personalities that compose them. Rob was particularly curious about the differences between entities and personalities.

“Individual life, or rather the life of any present individual, could be legitimately compared to the dream of an entity. While the individual enjoys his given number of years, these are but a flash to the entity. The entity is concerned with these years in somewhat the same manner with which you are concerned with your dreams. As you give inner purpose and organization to your dreams, and obtain insight and satisfaction from them though they involve only a part of your life, so the entity to some extent directs and gives purpose and organization to his personalities.

“Infinities of diversity and opportunity are given to the personalities by the entity. … Your own dreams are fragments, even as in a larger sense you are fragments of your entity.” Seth also said that an inner part of each personality was aware of its relationship with its entity—and that this portion did man’s breathing for him and controlled those bodily processes that we consider involuntary.

For a while I think I spent half the time trying to psychoanalyze Seth and the other half trying to analyze myself. Caution is one thing, but sometimes I went overboard. Even so, Seth said that my strong ego was an asset to our work when I didn’t overdo it, since it kept my whole personality on an even keel and allowed me the psychological strength to handle and develop my abilities.

“No control personality or whatever is going to tell me how to run the house,” I said. “This is one of those suspicious signs that we’ve read about. The control personality starts throwing its weight around and trying to dominate the medium’s normal personality. Remember what Dr. Stevenson said? Besides, there’s no room in the kitchen for the big refrigerator.”