“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

“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.

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.”

“The energy of action, the workings of action within and upon itself, forms identity. Yet though identity is formed from action, action and identity cannot be separated. Identity, then, is action’s effect upon itself. Without identity, action would be meaningless, for there would be nothing upon which action could act. Action must, by its very nature, of itself and its own workings, create identities. This applies from the most simple to the most complex.

“It is this dilemma, between identity’s constant attempts to maintain stability and action’s inherent drive for change, that results in the imbalance, the exquisite creative by-product that is consciousness of self. For consciousness and existence do not result from delicate balances so much as they are made possible by lack of balances, so richly creative that there would be no reality were balance ever maintained.

“These three dilemmas represent three areas of reality within which inner vitality can experience itself. And here also we have the reason why inner vitality can never achieve complete materialization. The very action involved in vitality’s attempt to materialize itself adds to the inner dimension of vitality itself.

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.

These Inner Senses belong to the whole selves of which we are part. Each whole self helps and inspires its personalities. Starting with the personality as we usually think of it, “there is, after the operating ego, a layer of personal subconscious material. Beneath this is racial material dealing with the species as a whole. Beneath this, undistorted and yours for the asking, is the knowledge inherent in the inner self, pertaining to reality as a whole, its laws, principles, and composition.

“Here you will find the innate knowledge concerning the creation of the camouflage universe as you know it, the mechanics involved, and much of the material I have given you. You will find the ways and means by which the inner self, existing in the climate of psychological reality, helps create the various planes of existence, constructs outer senses to project and perceive these, and the ways by which reincarnations take place within various systems. Here you will find your own answers as to how the inner self transforms energy for its own purposes, changes its form, and adopts other realities.”

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.

“The future consists of a series of electromagnetic connections in the mind and brain also, and this is the only reality that you are justified in giving the present.

“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.

“Difficulties arise, in fact, when such alterations do not occur automatically. Severe neurosis is often caused precisely because the individual has not changed his past. Once more, the only reality that can be assigned to the past is that granted to the symbols and associations and images that exist electromagnetically within the physical brain and nonphysical mind.

“Now this couple represented a sort of time-projection, for literally you could have become what they were. This existed in that present as a probability. You perceived that portion of the probable future and reacted to it, and the possible transformation of yourselves into those images did not occur. Because past, present, and future exist simultaneously, there is no reason why you cannot react to an event whether or not it happens to fall within the small field of reality in which you usually observe and participate.