“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. …”

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.

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.

I just stared at him. We hadn’t danced together in the eight years of our marriage, and the band was playing a twist, with which we were entirely unfamiliar at the time. Moreover, Rob wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was afraid of making a fool of myself, but Rob dragged me out on the dance floor. We danced for the rest of the evening, and from that point on his physical condition improved remarkably. His whole outlook on life seemed brighter as of that moment.

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.

“There was an afternoon in a small park when you were a child about eleven. You thought you were alone. It was close to five, September 17, on a day when there was no school. Another boy appeared. You had not seen him approach and took it for granted that he came by way of a walk that wound around a bandstand. He had jacks in his hand. You looked at each other and were about to speak, when a squirrel ran up a nearby tree.

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.