“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I was quite nervous before the next session. I’d had a particularly trying day at the gallery, and Rob was tired, too. Yet Rob woke up quickly enough, for I was to speak for Seth for over two hours. This session was quite startling for another reason also—the information itself was quite as surprising as the way I was saying it.

Rob laughed, and said, “Seth, are plants and trees fragments?”

The pointer began to dash across the board. IN A SENSE, ALL THINGS COULD BE CALLED FRAGMENTS … but the words were piling up in my head, and after the first few sentences were spelled out, I felt that sense of diving down into the unknown, of letting go. Then I began speaking for Seth again. “But there are different kinds. Personality fragments differ from others in that they can cause other fragments to form from themselves …”

This was a rather hilarious attitude, come to think of it. Actually, as I spoke for Seth I paced the room constantly, yet was hardly aware of doing so. Rob took notes as quickly as he could. He didn’t know shorthand or speedwriting, so he took everything down in longhand and then typed it up the following day. He soon began to develop his own system of symbols and abbreviations, however.

I continued giving this material from 9:00 on, steadily, until Rob had writer’s cramp at 9:50. I’ve only given excerpts. Both of us were amazed that I’d spoken for so long, and delivered such involved sentences without corrections or hesitations of any kind. Then, ten minutes later while we were resting, Rob said that he was going to ask if we’d ever seen such “personality fragment” images. At once, the words started up in my head again, and I began to dictate. While speaking I had no idea of the meaning of the words, so it wasn’t until our next rest period that I knew what Seth had been saying. It was this following passage that both of us, later, found so disquieting.

Rob knew instantly the episode to which Seth was referring. How he managed to sit there calmly taking notes while Seth went on, is more than I know.

Now Seth was saying, “Looking back, you can say that the effect was therapeutic, but if you had subconsciously accepted the images, it would have marked the beginning of a severe deterioration for you both, personally and creatively. Again, the images marked the critical culmination of your destructive energies. The fact that the images were of yourselves shows that your destructive energies were turned inward, even though materialized in physical form.

During a break Rob told me what Seth had said about the images. Neither of us had ever heard about thought-forms then, and the whole thing sounded incredible to me. And yet, I thought, psychologists talk about projection and transference by which we project our fears outward to another person or object and then react to them.

“Maybe Seth means a symbolic creation?” I said. But soon the words started coming again, and it became obvious that Seth was insisting upon a literal materialization.

Again I was speaking for Seth. “The projected fragments disappeared. They stood up, walked across the floor, and disappeared in the crowd. They had no power to leave the place where they were born unless you gave it to them. Remember that they did exist … by the same token your triumph reinforced the healthy aspects of your present egos.”

The evening grew late, but Seth showed no signs of wearing out. Just before midnight, Rob and I took another rest period, and decided to end the session. (It was Seth, incidentally, who suggested we take a five-to-ten-minute break every half hour or so.) Rob and I didn’t know what to make of this session. It was the first time I’d spoken for so long at a time, for one thing. For another, we didn’t know how to evaluate what was said.

Seth’s explanation of the York Beach affair made intuitive sense to us. Certainly something significant had happened that night, but had we actually materialized the physical images of our hidden fears? Did people do this often? If so, the implications were staggering. Or was the explanation psychologically and symbolically valid, but practically a lot of nonsense?

Should we continue with the sessions? I was somewhat more reluctant than Rob, being so directly involved, but what an opportunity, I thought! We decided to hold at least a few more sessions to see what might develop. Rob had some questions about fragment personalities he wanted to ask: What did Seth mean when he said we could have turned into those images? Rob wrote the questions down so he wouldn’t forget them, and two nights later we sat down at the board once more. At this point, of course, we had no idea whether or not each session would be our last, regardless of our conscious decisions. For all we knew, Seth might vanish as Frank Withers had. Rob had his list of questions ready so we could get some answers while we still had the opportunity.

But in this next session, I spoke for Seth for a longer time than I had before. Seth gave us a detailed account of two past lives and began a reincarnational history of Rob’s family. The material contained some excellent psychological insights; using them, we found ourselves getting along much better with our relatives. But I didn’t like this insistence upon reincarnation at all. “The psychological insights are great,” I said to Rob at break. “But the reincarnational part is probably fantasy. Delightful, but fantasy.”

Then when the session resumed, Rob asked the question that had been on our minds since Seth first mentioned the York Beach images. “If Jane and I had subconsciously accepted those images, would we have been able to return home, where we’re known? The images were older.”

Instantly the words tumbled through my head and out my mouth. I was out and Seth was on. “The images represented a culmination of many years’ experience of a negative trend. If you had accepted them, you would have ended up as replicas as you transferred into the images. Yet, what creativity and constructiveness you possessed would have softened the faces. You would be recognizable to friends but changes would be noted. The remark would be made that perhaps you didn’t seem the same, and with good reason.”

“And think of the people we’ve known who suddenly seem entirely different than they used to be, in ways we can’t fathom,” Rob said. “If Seth’s right, they actually became the destructive images they had of themselves.”

By the time Seth gave us this information, we had the background to understand it. In his discussions on health, Seth has always maintained that illness is often the result of dissociated and inhibited emotions. The psyche attempts to get rid of them by projecting them into a specific area of the body; in the case of ulcers, the diverted energy goes into the actual production of the ulcer itself. If really large areas of the self are inhibited, a secondary personality can be formed, grouped about those qualities distrusted and denied by the primary ego, and usually opposed to it. In other instances, the inhibited emotions can be projected outward into other persons, or as in the case of the York Beach images, very charged repressed energy can actually form pseudophysical images which present the personality with the physically materialized image of his fears.

Then, however, all of this was new to us. For all I knew, Seth was a secondary personality himself, and at this point we could have dropped the sessions. Though we found them intriguing, we certainly weren’t convinced that Seth was someone who had survived death. Most likely, we thought, he was a very lively portion of my own subconscious. By now we’d done enough reading to worry about the secondary personality angle. There was no evidence of excessive emotionalism in the material, though: no repressed hates, prejudices, or desires. Seth made no demands of any kind upon either of us.