“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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 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.

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

This was a great fulfillment on his part, for the inventor did not trust himself to feel much emotion, much less give birth to emotional beings. In that other probability in which your parents originally met, your mother married a doctor, became a nurse, and helped her husband in his practice. She became an independent woman, and — again in your historical context — when it took some doing for a woman to distinguish herself.

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.

(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.

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.

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.