“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:)

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.

(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?’”

(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.

(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.)

I do know a deeper compassion for my parents now than I did when they were alive. To paraphrase a remark one of my brothers made recently, I miss them in ways I couldn’t have anticipated before their deaths. Each of them died at the age of 81 — my father in 1971, my mother in 1973. For those who are interested, I drew a likeness of my father for one of my pen-and-ink illustrations in Jane’s Dialogues, and incorporated an image of my mother in another one. See pages 89 and 137 of that book.

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.”

A note added later: Adventures (or Aspects, as we also call it) was published in September, 1975, by Prentice-Hall, Inc. I did 16 schematic pen-and-ink drawings for it, many of which contain representations of Jane’s “living area.”

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.

I might add that if the York Beach adventure was a strong sign for us of psychic development to come (even if we weren’t able to interpret much of it at first), then Jane’s reception a month later of her manuscript, Idea Construction, was another; and that experience contained obvious psychic elements. See Note 7 for the last session.