“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This episode and a few similar ones have made me wary of such encounters with so-called objective academicians. But all psychologists aren’t so narrow-minded and intellectually rigid. Last year one of my students was taking a psychology course in the local college night sessions, and with the professor’s encouragement, she frequently discussed Seth and our ESP classes. My student wanted to do one of her required papers on the nature of personality as explained by Seth. She asked Seth if he would give a special session for this purpose. She wanted to record it and play it for the college class.

Seth agreed, and devoted one entire class to the session. He had some interesting things to say about his own reality, too. In a way, it is not the kind of in-depth discussion Seth would give in one of our private sessions, but it contains an excellent thumbnail description of his theories on personality, for those who have no previous knowledge of the Seth Material. For that reason, I’ll use excerpts from it to open this chapter.

There were about ten of my regular students at the session. Seth was at his best: smiling, often breaking up serious material with a few light jokes or comments. Most of the time he spoke directly to the student who requested the session, or addressed the sixty members of her psychology class, who were not present. The whole session ran about six single-typed pages.

Seth began by saying: “Identity is not the same as personality. Personality represents only those aspects of identity that you are able to actualize within three-dimensional existence. … Personality may be molded by circumstances, in your terms, but identity uses the experiences and is not swept willy-nilly.

Then Seth addressed the members of the college class for whom the recording would be played. We all thought, later, that this session was hilarious in one way—a personality invisible in our terms, addressing an absent psychology class on the nature of personality! Yet Seth certainly knew what he was doing, for he used his own unorthodox method of communication as a case in point.

Then, smiling, Seth went further into the question of his own existence—and mine. He began by stating that he had always cautioned me to maintain a good balance between solitude and activity. Then he spoke to the professor of the psychology class:

The psychology class was as much interested in Seth’s reality as in the nature of personality, as he well knew. Smiling, Seth said, “One other point: These sessions are scheduled, and therefore operate under certain controlled conditions. Ruburt’s own personality is in no way threatened by them, and his ego has been carefully coddled and protected. It has not been shunted aside. Instead it has been taught new abilities. … I was not artificially ‘brought to birth’ through hypnosis. There was no artificial tampering of personality characteristics here. There was no hysteria. Ruburt allows me to use the nervous system under highly controlled conditions. I am not given a blanket permission to take over when I please, nor would I desire such an arrangement. I have other things to do.”

As far as I can see, Seth’s reference to hypnosis had to do with the “training” undergone by some mediums in which hypnosis is used to initiate and stabilize the trance state, and occasionally to call forth the communications of “control” personalities. This didn’t happen in my case. The whole thing was spontaneous. Although I know how to use self-hypnosis now, having studied it in the past several years, I’ve never used it for a session.

Seth ended this discussion by outlining various ways to develop awareness of the inner self. This material will be given in a later chapter. My student played the tape during her next college class, and since it ran longer than the allotted time, the psychology professor and some of the students went to her house later to hear the whole tape and discuss it.

Seth’s personality, of course, comes through on tape better than on the printed page, because his inflections and connotations are obvious. Also, we recorded a few moments of conversation, so that my normal voice could be compared with Seth’s. Even the most lecturelike private session is always enlivened by Seth’s gestures, and this is more marked when he is relating to a group.

Granted we survive death, what part of us survives? As Seth gave us more material on reincarnation and the inner self, we naturally wondered. Having a whole self may be great, but if my Jane Roberts self is engulfed by it after death, then to me that’s not much of a survival. It’s like saying that the little fish survives when it’s eaten by a bigger one because it becomes part of it.

But according to Seth, no individuality is ever lost. It is always in existence. The tricky point here is that the self has no boundaries except those it accepts out of ignorance. Our individual consciousness grows, and out of its experience it forms different “personalities” or fragments of itself. These fragments—Jane Roberts is one of them—are entirely independent as to action and decision, yet the inner psychic components are constantly in communication with the whole self of which they are part. These “fragments” themselves grow, develop, and may form their own entities or “personality gestalts”—or, if you prefer, whole souls.

Seth says that even in this life, each of us has various egos; we only accept the idea of one ego as a sort of shorthand symbolism. The ego at any given time in this life is simply the part of us that “surfaces”; a group of characteristics that the inner self uses to solve various problems. Even the ego as we think of it changes constantly. For example, the Jane Roberts of now is different from the Jane Roberts of ten years ago, though “I” have not been conscious of any particular change of identity.

Of course, these abilities don’t mean much unless you learn to use them and experience them for yourself. Early in our sessions Seth described what he calls the Inner Senses—inner methods of perception that expand normal consciousness and allow us to become aware of our own multidimensional existence. It was some time before we fully understood what these meant, and how we could use them, and we are still learning to use them more effectively.

As mentioned earlier, what Seth said to us in sessions was also backed up by what happened in them. As he spoke about latent potentials, we found ourselves discovering our own. To a large extent, then, our personal experiences corroborated Seth’s theories. For example, Session 138 on March 8, 1965, is a case in point.

That night Seth was just beginning his material on personality as action. The ideas he presented are basic to his overall theories of identity, and since he deals with some of the characteristics of consciousness, they are also a basis for later material on the God concept.

At the time, we were having sessions in the bedroom, which is small, with one window looking out on the large yard. It was summer; hardly anyone knew of the sessions yet, and Seth’s full voice, rising out on the nighttime air, would have raised questions we weren’t ready to answer. As he has done since the beginning, Rob sat with pen and paper, taking verbatim notes. He often felt quite warm, since we closed the window to keep the sessions as private as possible, particularly since neighbors were often sitting in the yard. (The heat never bothers me when I’m in trance, although otherwise I’m very susceptible to it.)

Reading the excerpts, you can see that Seth did give hints as to what was to come. Some of you, reading between the lines, may even guess what was in store for us.

As Seth delivered the material you have just read, I had a series of continuing experiences that were new to me. I couldn’t tell Rob about them until our breaks, of course, and indeed, they are nearly impossible to describe. The nearest I can come is to say that as this information was being given verbally to Rob, it was given to me in a different way also. I seemed to be inside “action,” drifting through various dimensions.

I felt what Seth was saying, as if the words were translated into subjective experience. It was more like being swept along into something else than being, say, negated. My ego wasn’t lost, but became part of the concepts Seth was talking about. I was inside them, looking out.

Toward the end of the session, Rob asked Seth if he’d explain what was happening. Seth said: “Ruburt is experiencing action gestalts. Like every other consciousness, he is action; but this evening he is experiencing action, to some small degree, without the ego’s usual attempt to separate itself [from action].

This sort of thing began to happen frequently in sessions. Later we took it for granted, I guess, without realizing what an impression it made on us the first time. My experiences usually parallel whatever information Seth is giving. According to Seth, this involves the use of the Inner Senses, and my experiences are meant to point up the existence of these abilities not only in me, but as the latent capabilities of each personality.

Seth says that the physical body and its senses are specialized equipment to allow us to live in physical reality. To perceive other realities, we have to use the Inner Senses—methods of perception that belong to the inner self and operate whether or not we have a physical form. Seth calls the universe as we know it a “camouflage” system, since physical matter is simply the form that vitality—action—takes within it. Other realities are also camouflage systems, and within them consciousness also has specialized equipment tailored to their peculiar characteristics. But the Inner Senses allow us to see beneath the camouflage.

Quite a mouthful! What Seth is saying is that each of us can reach the inner self, that the Inner Senses help us to perceive other than three-dimensional reality, and that we can get to this knowledge with determination and training. We start with ourselves and travel through our own subjective experience, working from the ego inward. The physical senses help us to perceive the exterior reality that we know. The Inner Senses let us perceive the inner ones.

To some extent Rob and I have experienced most of these Inner Senses to some degree. Take a fairly simple one—Psychological Time. Seth says, “From within its framework you will see that physical time is as dreamlike as you once thought inner time was. You will discover your whole selves, peeping inward and outward at the same ‘time,’ and find that all time is one time, and all divisions, illusions.”

A deeper appreciation of this subject requires more information about the real nature of time, however; because according to Seth the inner self operates not within time as we know it, but through perceptions that largely ignore time as we know it.

The question comes up, then: How can we ignore time? What is there about ourselves, or time, that we can disconnect one from the other? Some of you may not be interested in such questions, but others will feel cheated if they are left unanswered. Seth does not ignore such issues, and I’m closing this chapter with a few excerpts in which he considers them. Here Seth partially explains the nature of time, and shows why we are basically free of it.