“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Consciousness is composed of energy, with everything that implies. The psyche, then, can be thought of as a conglomeration of highly charged “particles” of energy, following rules and properties, many simply unknown to you. On other levels, laws of dynamics apply to the energy sources of the self. Think of a given “self” as a nucleus of an energy gestalt of consciousness. That nucleus, according to its intensity, will attract to it certain masses of the entire energy patterns available to a given identity.

In those terms the identity at birth is composed of a variety of such “selves,” with their nuclei, and from that bank the physical personality has full freedom to draw. Ruburt’s mystical nature was such a strong portion of the entire identity that in his present reality, and in the probable reality chosen — as mentioned when I discussed this picture (of Jane) — the mystic impulses and expressions were given play. Intersections with probable realities occur when one psychic grouping intensifies to a certain point, so that fulfillment as a self results.

From your viewpoint these offshoots of energy become unreal. They exist as surely as you do, however. In terms of energy, this multiplication of selves is a natural principle. (To me:) Your “sportsman self”* was never endowed with the same kind of force as that of your artistic or writing self. It became subsidiary, yet present to be drawn upon, taking joy through your motion and adding its vitality to your “main” personality.

Had it been given extra force through your environment, circumstances, or your own intent, then either your artistic self would have become subservient or complementary; or, if the energy selves were of nearly equal intensity, then one of them would have become an offshoot, propelled by its own need for fulfillment into a probable reality. Do you follow me?

In terms of energy, intent is stabilizing. There is a center to the self, again, that acts as a nucleus. The nucleus may change, but it will always be the center from which physical existence will radiate. Physically, intent or purpose forms that center, regardless of its reality in terms of energy.

By far, the creative, mechanically inventive personality began to outstrip the other. The father that you knew was the probable self, therefore. That probable self, however, dealt with emotional realities that the other avoided, and this was indeed his sole intent.

(Pause at 10:07.) This does not mean that such a personality is limited, basically, or that he does not collect about him new interests and challenges, for he is himself mobile. He even has many of the characteristics of the other self, though these of course are latent. But through having children your father brought about the birth of emotional existence, fullbodied and alive, in sons.³

Your father’s greatest vitality was in the inventor’s reality, and so in your terms this one suffered. This does not mean that each personality, regardless of probabilities, is not endowed with free will, and so forth. Each is born, in whatever system, from a source gestalt energy, and develops.

(Some quick figuring showed us that the 50’s for my mother had encompassed the years 1942–51. From my present viewpoint I had no idea if she’d consciously or unconsciously experienced any influx of energy resulting from the death of a probable self during that decade. In those days the Buttses didn’t think in such terms, for one thing; for another, I was absent from the family home in Sayre for much of that time. In 1947, for example, when my mother was 55 years old, I was 28 and living in New York City. I wasn’t to meet Jane for five years. And even if Stella Butts were still living, I think it would be difficult to question her about an event that would have taken place approximately a quarter of a century ago.

(I told Jane now that had my mother received any additional energy during her 50’s, she might have expressed its benefits through the habitual mores of our society, in terms of changes rather than of probabilities, say “My life changed for the better at that point, when I made that decision.” I added that perhaps the important thing for us now was to observe our unfolding lives with Seth’s ideas of the larger, or whole self, in mind, and so achieve insights we could interpret in terms of probabilities. So we decided not to ask Seth to backtrack and give us material about the son my mother’s probable self had had in her reality, even though that son was a probable self of mine.

Now: There are basically no limitations to the self, and all portions of the self are connected — so the probable selves are aware, unconsciously, of their relationships.

None of this is predetermined. An offshoot probable self might leave your reality at age 13, say, but could intersect with you again at age 30 for a variety of reasons — where to you, you suddenly change a profession, or become aware of a talent you thought you had forgotten, and find yourself developing it with amazing ease.

The Butts family albums contain numerous photographs of my father as a young man, many of them self-taken with the aid of a timer; he poses with a variety of automobiles and motorcycles through the years before his marriage to my mother in 1917, and afterward, too. Sometimes he’d assembled the vehicles himself, or modified them in his own ways. In 1922 he took his wife and children (I was 3 years old, Linden not yet 2) on a six-month motor trip from the East Coast to California. When our touring car broke a rear axle on a remote dirt road in Montana, he fashioned a substitute in a blacksmith shop.

6. Jane covers our York Beach “dancing episode” in Chapter 2 of The Seth Material, and also quotes information Seth gave us on it in later sessions. The mystifying event took place during our vacation in York Beach, Maine, in August, 1963, a few months before Jane began to speak for Seth. At the time we understood little of what happened; yet the event represented a key episode at the very beginning of our psychic education; for in a crowded, smoky hotel barroom Jane and I unknowingly created physical “personality fragments” of ourselves — then came face to face with them. In the 9th session for December 18, 1963, Seth explained what we had been up to, and called our creations “fragments of our selves, thrown-off materializations of your own negative and aggressive feelings.” (Naturally, the more Seth told us about the human ability to generate such forms, the more questions we had!) In that 9th session Seth also used his term, “probable self,” for the first time.