“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

“The present individual in any given life could be called a fragment of his entire entity, having all the properties of the original entity, though they remain latent or unused. The image that your friend saw was a personality fragment of his own. It contained all the abilities of your friend, whether latent or not I do not know. This type of personality fragment is of different origin than your friend, who is himself a fragment of his own entity. We call this type a split personality fragment or a personality image fragment. Usually it cannot operate on all levels of your physical plane.

“An individual may send a personality fragment image into another level of existence entirely, even without his own conscious knowledge. It may gain valuable information on this other level, and then return. Sometimes the individual is not capable of assimilating this knowledge, or even of recognizing his own returning personality image. The type of fragment your friend saw was of this type, but so disconnected from your friend, and so absentmindedly was it sent upon its travels, that its information was probably passed directly to the entity which your friend represents. …”

“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.”

“Your dancing represented the first move away from what those images meant, and violent action was the best thing under the circumstances … a subtle transformation could have taken place in which you and Jane transferred the bulk of your personalities into the fragments you had yourselves created … and from their eyes watched yourselves across the room. In this case your present dominant personalities would no longer be dominant.”

“It was a personality fragment of your own. You were wishing for a playmate, and were jealous because your brother stayed so long with your father. Quite without knowing it, you materialized a personality fragment as a playmate. You had no way of knowing what had happened at the time, and could not give any permanence to the image.

“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.

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.

In the meantime, the Christmas holidays came along. We had no sessions for two weeks. Both of us wondered what would happen when—and if—we tried again. But the next episode so upset our ideas of what was possible, so outraged our conventional theories, that we very nearly quit the whole thing. Obviously we didn’t—yet our reactions were to color our activities for the next several years, and greatly influence the direction in which I would allow my own psychic abilities to operate.