“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In the last session, Seth began discussing separate photographs of Jane and me [taken at the ages of 12 and 2, respectively] in connection with his ideas about probable selves. Since we wanted Seth to continue with the same material tonight, we looked the pictures over again while waiting for him to come through. Then, without greetings:)

(10:25. Jane’s trance had been an excellent one. She said that while immersed in it she’d thought the material “fantastically complicated … like: “Where are you in all of this — where’s your soul?’”

(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.

(As we talked, Jane decided to go back into trance; she was getting so many “bleed-throughs” on the material herself that she was beginning to feel consciously confused. But Seth had all the data there, she said, if she had the time to give it. Resume at 10:45.)

(11:15. After giving two pages of material for Jane, here deleted, Seth closed out the session at 11:33 P.M.)

2. I think that as a child I often sensed my parents’ feelings of strangeness about this reality, although I was quite unable to express myself in those terms. Perhaps I’m reinterpreting old memories in the light of Seth’s material here. Consciously, however, I knew nothing then about probable realities or the power of belief; I was just acutely aware of the unending differences of opinion between my mother and father, and of my unformed questions about the reasons for their behavior; at the same time I saw them struggling to live like others I knew. I don’t think I even discussed my confused feelings with my brothers as we grew older. On several occasions Seth has given very blunt, very perceptive interpretations of the churning relationship involving my parents. That material is too long and complex to excerpt here, but I’d like to treat it separately sometime.

3. While dealing with emotional realities in this life, my father also exercised very considerable mechanical abilities. According to Seth’s ideas, these would have represented bleed-throughs from his “inventor” probable reality.

Returning east to Sayre, Pa., he opened his auto-repair and battery shop. (Again, see Note 9 for the 679th session.) Through our early school years Linden and I had part-time “jobs” at our father’s shop, and many chances to watch him work. I think that his exacting mechanical abilities are reflected in Linden’s very realistic models, and are transmuted in the methods I use to solidly “construct” my paintings and to keep the records for the Seth material.

4. Seth has insisted from the very beginning of these sessions (late in 1963) that there are no closed systems — and in so doing has given us clues about his own ability to travel through at least some of them.

From the 14th session for January 8: “Everything on your plane is a materialization of something that exists independently of your plane.”

“As I have mentioned earlier, the senses change according to the plane of materialization. If you are speaking about my present form, I can be many forms. That is, within limits I can change my form, but in doing so I do not actually change my form as much as I choose to become part of something else.

“My incipient form is a man’s form, if this is what you want to know, but it is not materialized in the same fashion as yours — that is, as your form [is] — and I can dematerialize it whenever I choose. It is not at all physical in your terms, however, and so here I suppose we will run into a block [in your understanding]….”

Jane quotes Seth’s material from the 12th session much more extensively in Chapter 3 of The Seth Material; see Seth’s analogy involving cubes (realities) within cubes.

5. Jane is now working on the final draft of her own theoretical work on psychic matters, Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology. She started Adventures in July, 1971, and has stayed with it through all of her other writing projects. It’s first mentioned (as Adventures in Consciousness) in Chapter 21 of Seth Speaks; see the 587th session. In her glossary for Adventures Jane defines the living area as “The ‘paths’ our lives follow from birth to death.”

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.