“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:)

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?

(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

(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.)

(11:02.) Give us a moment … I told you (in the last session) that in one probability Ruburt was a nun, expressing mysticism in a highly disciplined context, where it must be watched so that it does not get out of hand. Because there is an unconscious flow of information and experience here, you have one of the reasons for Ruburt’s caution in some psychic matters, and his fear of leading people astray. There were three offshoots: one, the nun, with mysticism conventionally expressed, but under guarded circumstances; one, the writer who veiled mystical experience through art; and one, the Ruburt you know, who experienced mystical experience directly, teaches others to do the same, and forms through writing a wedding of the two aspects. You have known two of those selves, then, and you were present at Ruburt’s birth with Idea Construction.

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.

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 15th session for January 13: “Imagination allows you to enter into these planes … Pretend that you not only understand your cat’s concept of time to some degree, but could also experience his sense of time through the cat [Willy] himself. In doing this you would in no way bother, inhibit, or annoy the cat. He would not be aware of your presence. Nor could this be represented as any sort of invasion.

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.”