“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Not too long ago, a young psychology professor called and asked me to speak to his class at the local college. It was a small group of about fifteen students, so I suggested that they come to my apartment instead. The man’s attitude was apparent the minute he came in the door. Personally he wouldn’t touch a medium with a ten-foot pole, but since they did exist and he knew of one, he felt duty-bound to “expose” his students to the phenomenon. And undoubtedly, he patted himself on the back for his broad-mindedness.

Carefully—I thought!—I explained that suggestion was very important, and asked the professor to have an objective attitude during the tests. But, as I later discovered through one of his students, his attitude was anything but objective and hardly scientific. He let the class know through his statements and general behavior that he thought such tests were beneath serious consideration. Oddly enough, the results weren’t bad at all, but his attitude was so poor that only five girls took part in the experiment. I suggested that he try the experiment too, but he wouldn’t; and his attitude discouraged enough students so that he could say, later, that the low number participating made tests results impossible to evaluate. He dismissed all of the hits made as coincidence.

The professor was intelligent, personable, earnest. Had we met under different circumstances, I probably would have liked him. But he didn’t want to reconsider or evaluate his preconceived ideas of the nature of personality. He missed an opportunity to broaden his outlook, and, perhaps, to find the kind of evidence that would convince him that human personality was far less limited than he supposed.

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.

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.

“I have helped him, in that his own personality operates more effectively. He is able to use his own abilities more fully. But that is hardly a psychological crime. The facts are, dear psychology class and professor, that all of you are more than you know. Each of you exists in other realities and other dimensions, and the self that you call yourself is but a small portion of your entire identity.

“Now, in dreams you do have contact with other parts of yourself. This communication goes on constantly, but your ego is so focused upon physical reality and survival within it that you do not hear the inner voice. You must realize that what you are cannot be seen in a mirror. What you see in a mirror is but a dim reflection of your true reality.

“You do not see your ego in the mirror. You do not see your subconscious. You do not see the inner self in a mirror. These are but terms to express the part of you that cannot be seen or touched. But within the selves that you know is the prime identity, the whole inner self. This whole self has lived many lives. It has adopted many personalities. It is an energy essence personality, even as I am. The only difference is that I am not materialized within physical matter. You do not suddenly acquire a ‘spirit’ at death. You are one, now.”

“You may, if you wish, call me a subconscious production. I do not particularly enjoy such a designation, since it is not true. But if you do call me a subconscious extension of Ruburt’s own personality, then you must agree that the subconscious is telepathic and clairvoyant, since I have shown telepathic and clairvoyant abilities. So, may I remind you, has Ruburt on his own. … However, unless you are willing to assign to the subconscious those abilities—and most of your colleagues do not—then I cannot be considered to have such a subconscious origin.

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.

My own experiences convince me that I am more than my normal self, the self I refer to as “me.” In getting clairvoyant information, for instance, some part of me knows what the Jane-part ordinarily does not. This portion of me communicates the knowledge to the Jane ego. I believe that this happens not only in the case of ESP, but also in connection with artistic inspiration: we tune into more knowledgeable portion of our own identities.

“Identity may be termed action which is conscious of itself. For the purposes of our discussion, the terms ‘action’ and ‘identity’ must be separated, but basically no such separation exists. An identity is also a dimension of existence, action within action, an unfolding of action upon itself—and through this interweaving of action with itself, through this re-action, an identity is formed.

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.

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.

“In other words, the past and present are real to the same extent. On occasion the past can become more ‘real’ than the present, and in such cases past actions are reacted to in what you call the present. You take it for granted that present action can change the future, but present actions can also change the past.

“The connections, therefore, can be changed, and such changes are far from uncommon. They happen spontaneously on a subconscious basis. The past is seldom what you remember it to be, for you have already rearranged it from the instant of any given event. The past is being constantly re-created by each individual as attitudes and associations change. This is an actual re-creation, not a symbolic one. The child is indeed still within the man, but he is not the child that ‘was.’ For even the child within the man constantly changes.

“In all of these instances, however, there are uncertainties, for probable events can be seen as clearly as events that will physically happen. No event is predestined. Any given event can be changed not only before and during but after its occurrence. Again, I am not speaking symbolically, and I realize that I am leaving myself open to strong criticisms that certainly cannot be answered in this one evening.

“There are, for example, limitations set here that must be clearly stated, but within these limitations you will find that events can be changed and are constantly changed, regardless of the apparent point of their original happening.

“In summation: the individual is hardly at the mercy of past events, for he changes them constantly. He is hardly at the mercy of future events, for he changes these not only before but after their happening.