“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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?

(9:44.) Give us a moment … Your parents literally did not share the same reality at all. This is not as unusual as you may think. They met and related in a place between each of their realities. It was not that they disagreed with each other’s interpretation of events. The events were different.

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.

In your family life in this reality, your parents acted opaquely to each other. There were strong energy shifts, so that the personalities did not meet directly. Give us a moment … Some of this is difficult to explain. In a way they were unfocused, yet each with strong abilities, but dispersed. There was a reason for this.

They contained within themselves intense and yet blurred talents that were used as energy sources by the children. They came together precisely to give birth to the family, and for no other main reason as far as their joint reality was concerned. They seeded a generation, then.¹

Your mother loved physical reality and took the greatest pleasure in its most minute aspects, for all of her complaints. Your father loved it but never trusted it. Each of your parents had their strongest reality, this time, and in your terms, in a probable system of reality — and here (in this reality) they were offshoots. To them this system always seemed strange.²

In another system of reality your father was — in fact, still is — a well-known inventor, who never married but used his mechanically creative abilities to the fullest while avoiding emotional commitment. He met Stella (my mother). They were going to be married — and in terms of years, the same years are involved, historically. At one time, then, in your father’s past as you think of it, having met Stella, he did not marry her after all. His love was for machinery, the speed of motorcycles, mixing creativity with metal. At that point of intersection, equal desires and intents within him became like twin nuclei. Whole regroupings of energy occurred, psychological and psychic implosions, so that two equally valid personalities were aware in a world in which only one could live at a time.

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.

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.

When your picture was taken, therefore, your parents were already living in a probable reality, but you and [your brother] Linden were not. Now take your break.

(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.

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.

(To me again:) Your birth (in 1919) coincided with the birth of your mother’s child in that other reality, hence her stronger feelings toward you. Your birth, and that of your youngest brother (Richard) were highly charged for her — yours for the reasons just given, and your brother’s because it represented the time of your mother’s hysterectomy in that other reality. In this reality, Richard’s birth represented your father’s final attempt to deal with emotional reality. Both of your parents imbued the third son with the strongest emotional qualities of their natures. Your mother had him defiantly, after the usual childbirth age (she was 36) almost reacting against that [probable] hysterectomy. In this world, she could and would have another child.

Linden was the one “natural” child of this marriage. Watch how you interpret that, but he was the child least affected by other realities. For that reason, however, and because of your parents’ personalities here, the same amount of attention was not paid him psychically, and he felt that lack.

Give us a moment … The birth of Joseph took place at York Beach with the dancing episode,⁶ so you have in your own experience examples in adult life. I cannot give you everything in one evening, of course. A few glimpses before a word for Ruburt. Sportsmen make good money, so for this and other reasons you early turned to commercial art — a field in which artistic ability would be well paid for.

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.

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.

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 12th session for January 2, 1964: “I have more senses, so to speak, in operating use … than you have, because not only am I aware of my own plane [or reality], but of yours and other parallel planes, even though I myself have not existed in some of those others …” And: “There are certain environments that I cannot glimpse from my viewpoint, although I have greater understanding of these things than you. I realize that the changes that must occur before I can view those other planes will occur in me, and not in the planes.”

“Imagine further that you actually experienced the feeling of such a furry coat, and all the other feline equipment from the inside, purely as a spectator. This would loosely represent an analogy to my traveling to other planes. It follows that I could not travel to ‘higher’ environments than my own, where more acute senses would instantly perceive me … On many planes, we are fully visible to others on that plane. To some we are invisible; and to us, some are invisible.

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.