“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:)

Now: When I speak of probable selves, of course I am not speaking of some symbolic portion of the personality structure, or using the idea of probabilities as an analogy.

(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.

[...] I’m not writing here about rationalizing the existence of one or more probable selves to account for personal shortcomings in this reality, however, but of simply using the idea to enlarge our basic notions of the human potential. [...]

The sportsman that you might have been would have gathered, from that same available background, other attitudes and ideas that would have fit in with his concept of himself, and with his core focus. [...]