“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“Consciousness, therefore, is not a ‘thing’ in itself. It is a dimension of action, an almost miraculous state, made possible by what I choose to call a series of creative dilemmas.

“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.

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.

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 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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“Every action changes every other action—we go back to our ABC’s. Therefore, every action in your present affects those actions you call past. Ripples from a thrown stone go out in all directions, and I am going out rather far on the limb myself right here. Remembering what you know of the nature of time, you realize that the apparent boundaries between past, present, and future are only illusions caused by the amount of action you can physically perceive.

“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.