“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 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.”

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.

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.

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.”

“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.

“Occasionally a personality will astound itself by such an image production. Usually this type vanishes by the time the personality reaches adulthood. In childhood, however, such instances are frequent. Often when a child cries about a bogeyman, what he has seen is such an image production or fibrous projection, formed by vivid desire on the part of the subconscious.”

“But reincarnation—and kids forming fragment personalities or whatever as playmates?” I frowned. “Still, it’s fascinating as the dickens. And think what it means if it’s true!”

“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.

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.