“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“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.”

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.

Then when the session resumed, Rob asked the question that had been on our minds since Seth first mentioned the York Beach images. “If Jane and I had subconsciously accepted those images, would we have been able to return home, where we’re known? The images were older.”

“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.”

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

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.