“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

CHAPTER
TWO:

The York Beach Images—
“Fragment” Personalities

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.

“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. …”

“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.”

I continued giving this material from 9:00 on, steadily, until Rob had writer’s cramp at 9:50. I’ve only given excerpts. Both of us were amazed that I’d spoken for so long, and delivered such involved sentences without corrections or hesitations of any kind. Then, ten minutes later while we were resting, Rob said that he was going to ask if we’d ever seen such “personality fragment” images. At once, the words started up in my head again, and I began to dictate. While speaking I had no idea of the meaning of the words, so it wasn’t until our next rest period that I knew what Seth had been saying. It was this following passage that both of us, later, found so disquieting.

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.

“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!”

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.