“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Rob said it was as if I were reading from some invisible manuscript. My eyes were wide open. At that point I utterly refused to close them, nor would I sit down. Whatever was happening, I was going to be on my feet so I could have a good running start for the door in case I got worried.

“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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

Rob grinned, “Would you rather he didn’t?”

I shivered uneasily. “But it wouldn’t always be destructive, would it? Couldn’t it work the other way around?”

In the meantime, the Christmas holidays came along. We had no sessions for two weeks. Both of us wondered what would happen when—and if—we tried again. But the next episode so upset our ideas of what was possible, so outraged our conventional theories, that we very nearly quit the whole thing. Obviously we didn’t—yet our reactions were to color our activities for the next several years, and greatly influence the direction in which I would allow my own psychic abilities to operate.