“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN:

The Multidimensional Personality

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.

For two and a half hours I spoke on the potentials of human personality, and the necessity of recognizing, developing, and using them. To the best of my ability, I explained what telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition were, and what experiments might be conducted to show them in operation. Finally I suggested an exercise to be done by the students, such as we sometimes use in my own classes. A target sketch was to be tacked on the inside of my door each day. The girls would try to “pick up” an impression of the target drawing and reproduce it. I would mail my drawings to the professor at the end of the allotted time, and he could judge the hits and misses for himself.

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.

“It is true that there are no limitations to the self, and in one respect you can say that the self reaches out to encompass the environment. Current theories regarding the nature of personality do not take into consideration the existence of telepathy or clairvoyance or the fact of reincarnation. What you have, in effect, is a one-dimensional psychology. Identity operates in many dimensions, however. …”

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.

“You have here [in the session itself] a provocative demonstration of the nature of personality,” he said. “For my personality is not Ruburt’s, nor is his mine. I am not a secondary personality, for instance. I make no attempt to dominate Ruburt’s life, nor indeed would I expect him to allow it. I do not represent any repressed portions of Ruburt’s own being. As those here know, he is hardly the repressed type on his own!

“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.

“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.

“If you are willing to concede the point, then I have other arguments. My memories are not the memories of a young woman. My mind is not a young woman’s mind. I have been used to many occupations, and Ruburt has no memory of them. I am not a father image of Ruburt’s, nor am I the male figure that lurks in the back of the female mind. Nor does our friend Ruburt have homosexual tendencies. I am simply an energy essence personality, no longer materialized in physical form.

“Personality and identity are not dependent upon physical form. It is only because you think they are that you find this sort of performance so strange. … You adopt a body as a space traveler wears a space suit, and for much the same reason.”

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From Session 224: The Personality and Time