“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(To me, both photographs had a certain mysterious quality that I’d often found intriguing — an aura due partly to their being old, personal, and so irreplaceable, I suppose. But for a long time I’d been aware of other feelings connected with them. Jane had begun delivering the Seth material late in 1963, and soon afterwards Seth started developing his ideas on probabilities.¹ Many times while looking at the snapshots since then I’d found myself speculating about the probable realities surrounding their two young subjects. I told Jane now that I understood the course of action each of us had chosen to make physical, or “real” in our terms. But what of all the other paths our probable selves had embarked upon since those pictures had been taken? By now, did those photographs actually depict the immature images of us, the Jane and Rob we knew and had always been, or from our standpoint did they show a probable Jane, a probable Rob — two individuals who long ago had set out upon their own journeys through other realities? I wasn’t clear on what I wanted to know, and had trouble expressing myself to Jane. Maybe I just wanted Seth to comment on probabilities in a more personal way. [And added later: At the time, I had no idea that my questioning would trigger a new Seth book.²]

Each of you, again, chose your parents and environment. You spoke in your notes (two days ago) of precognition in connection with art — an excellent point. Precognition in those terms also applies at your birth, when ahead of time you are quite aware on unconscious levels of those conditions that you will meet. You have chosen them and projected them ahead of you, out into the medium of time.

The conditions, however, while “set” in one fashion, are highly plastic in another, so that a multitudinous variety of probable events can flow from them. Precognitively you are unconsciously quite aware — again in your terms — of the results of any given action or cause. When this (photograph) of Ruburt³ was taken, he had already become aware of the overall interests and concerns that would dominate his future life, although the particular course of it had not been chosen.

Ruburt’s nonconformance took the larger framework of unconventional ideas. In the background, as a child under the organization of the Welfare Department, self-indulgence, small luxuries or too-unconventional behavior, were all dangerous in the framework chosen — the neighbors could report any transgressions to Welfare. At about this time (tapping the photo) Ruburt sat on the lap of an adult man on the front porch, and neighbors duly reported this — the idea being that sexual depravity could be involved.

[...] More likely than not, they’d be chosen by the personality before birth, or outside the physical state.