“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“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.”

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.

The evening grew late, but Seth showed no signs of wearing out. Just before midnight, Rob and I took another rest period, and decided to end the session. (It was Seth, incidentally, who suggested we take a five-to-ten-minute break every half hour or so.) Rob and I didn’t know what to make of this session. It was the first time I’d spoken for so long at a time, for one thing. For another, we didn’t know how to evaluate what was said.

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 turned to watch and when you turned back, the boy was gone. For a short time you wondered, and then the incident was forgotten. As a matter of fact, at the same time your brother, Loren, was looking out the window of your father’s shop [across the way] and saw nothing.”

“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.”

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.