“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

CHAPTER
TWO:

The York Beach Images—
“Fragment” Personalities

“The man and woman in the York Beach dancing establishment … were fragments of your selves, thrown-off materializations of your own negative and aggressive feelings … the images were formed by the culminating energy of your destructive energies at the time. While you did not recognize them consciously, unconsciously you knew them well. Unconsciously you saw the image of your destructive tendencies, and these images themselves roused you to combat them.”

In late 1963, some months before our sessions began, we’d taken a vacation in York Beach, Maine, hoping that a change of environment would improve Rob’s health. The doctor didn’t know what was wrong with his back and suggested that he spend some time under traction in the hospital. Instead we decided that his reaction to stress was at least partially responsible, hence the trip.

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?

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.”

“Now as to the York Beach images. Here aggressive and destructive energies were unconsciously projected outward, given a pseudo-reality and temporary physical validity. The emotional charge provides the pattern and impetus for such creations. According to the extent of physical reality to be achieved, the physical body of the originator transfers or transposes portions of its own chemical structure. Proteins are used, and there is a high carbohydrate loss.

“In the same way that the body’s proteins and chemicals can be used to form various kinds of images, they may also be utilized to form an ulcer, goiter, or to affect other changes [in the body itself]. Here particular emotions are denied, dissociated. The individual does not want to accept them as a part of the self. Instead of projecting them outward as you did in the York Beach images, they are directed to a specific area of the body, or in other cases allowed to wander, traveling troublemakers, so to speak, through the body’s physical system.”

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.