“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.

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.

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!

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.”

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.)

“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.

“This first dilemma results in action, and from action’s own workings upon itself we have seen that identity was formed, and that these two are inseparable. Action is, therefore, a part of all structure. Action, having of itself and because of its nature formed identity, now also because of its nature would seem to destroy identity, since action must involve change, and any change seems to threaten identity.

“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.

“We have a series of creative strains. Identity must seek stability while action must seek change; yet identity could not exist without change, for it is the result of action and a part of it. Identities are never constant as you yourselves are not the same consciously or unconsciously from one moment to the next. Every action is a termination, as we discussed earlier. And yet without the termination, identity would cease to exist, for consciousness without action would cease to be conscious.

“I mentioned, in our last discussion, that this material would be the basis for future sessions. It is true that another dimension has been added to the sessions, and I hope to instruct Ruburt along the lines of more direct perception as we continue. I told you that such developments could be expected. These are natural unfoldings and will continue according to their own nature and in their own time. I expect that this latest development will involve still another.”

When we do “Psy-Time,” as Rob and I call it, our experiences seem to take place outside of the usual time framework. It’s like shifting gears, so that perception happens in a different context. Psy-Time is the “time” I travel in when I’m projecting, for example. When I went to California in the episode mentioned in Chapter 9, over six thousand miles were covered in a half hour. Obviously, in normal time, this would be impossible.