“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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 …”

“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.

Later Rob told me that he had all kinds of questions, but he didn’t want to interrupt, and his hand was already tired from taking notes. All the while I kept pacing up and down the room, eyes half open, delivering this monologue without a trace of hesitation.

“Increased concentration of the conscious individual is the trend. Then these split personality fragments or images can be kept under scrutiny without taxing the present ego to distraction. Now, what you would call the subconscious performs this task; not too well, since it was never meant to focus clear attention. Consciousness will expand within your plane. The scope of consciousness will be so broadened that all personality fragments, split personality images, and individual fragments in succeeding incarnations will be held in clear focus without strain. It is toward this that evolution is headed, though of course, at its usual donkey-slow rate.”

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.”

“You don’t have to make your mind up one way or the other tonight, do you?” Rob asked. “What’s the rush? See what else he has to say. Besides, I’ve learned as much about my family tonight as I have all my life. That’s worth something.”

“I love the way he ties all this in with subconscious motivation,” I said later.

“Not at all,” I said loftily, but I could see the faces of that couple in my mind still, and there were so many questions left up in the air. Some were answered in following sessions, and this explanation from a session some three years later is particularly interesting:

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.