“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In an effort to reassure her, I looked up what Seth said in Chapter 9 of Personal Reality, and showed it to her. See the 637th session: “… think now of the life of the self as one message leaping across the nerve cells of a multidimensional structure — again, as real as your body — and consider it also as a greater ‘moment of reflection’ on the part of such a many-sided personality … I am aware that [these analogies] can make you feel small or fear for your identity. You are more than a message, say, passing through the vast reaches of a superself. You are not lost in the universe.”

(10:11.) Not when I am finished. Most individuals, for example, develop intellectually or emotionally or physically, ignoring to a large degree the body’s and the mind’s full potential. The limited I-structure that you presently identify with selfhood is simply not capable of fully using all of those characteristics.

The I-structure arises from the inner self, formed about various interests, abilities, and drives. Selections are made as to the areas of concentration. You rarely find a person who is a great intellect, a great athlete, and also a person of deep emotional and spiritual understanding — an ideal prototype of what it seems mankind could produce.

In some systems of physical existence, a multipersonhood is established in which three or four “persons” emerge from the same inner self, each one utilizing to the best of its abilities those characteristics of its own. This presupposes a gestalt of awareness, however, in which each knows of the activities of the others, and participates; and you have a different version of mass consciousness. Do you see the correlation?

In the systems in which evolution of consciousness has worked in that fashion, all faculties of body and mind in one “lifetime” are beautifully utilized. Nor is there any ambiguity about identity. The individual would say, for example, “I am Joe, and Jane, and Jim, and Bob.” There are physical variations of a sexual nature, so that on all levels identity includes the male and female. Shadows of all such probabilities appear within your own system, as oddities. Anything apparent to whatever degree in your system is developed in another.

The point of all this is that these units are unpredictable, and fulfill all probabilities of consciousness. Any concepts of gods or other beings that are based upon limited ideas of personhood will ultimately be futile. You view the fantastic variety of physical life — its animals, insects, birds, fish, man and all his works — with hardly a qualm; yet you must understand that the nature of consciousness itself is far more varied, and you must learn to think of an inner reality that is as infinite as the exterior one. These concepts alone do alter your present consciousness, and change it in degree. The present idea of the soul, you see, is a “primitive” idea that can scarcely begin to explain the creativity or reality from which mankind’s being comes. You are multipersons (intently). You exist in many times and places at once. You exist as one person, simultaneously. This does not deny the independence of the persons, but your inner reality straddles their reality, while it also serves as a psychic world in which they can grow.³

These units combine into various kinds of gestalts of consciousness. Basically, it is not correct to say that one is more progressed than another. The petal of a flower, for example, is not more developed than the root. An ant on the ground may see that the petal is way above the root and stem, but ants are too wise to think that the petal must be better than the root.

All directions taken by the flower of consciousness are good. The flower knows it is alive in the bulb, but it takes “time” for the bulb to let the stem and leaves and flower emerge. The flower is not better than the bulb. It is not even more progressed than the bulb. It is the bulb in one of its manifestations. So in your terms, it may seem as if there are progressions, or consecutive steps of development, in which more mature comprehensive selves will emerge. You are a part of those selves now, as the petals are of the bulb. Only in your system is that time period meaningful.

The concepts in such a system as this can help break those barriers. There are, then, stratas of consciousness existing at once. The ones you are not aware of yet seem more progressed, developed than your own. You are a part of them now. You can know them as you begin to stretch your concepts of personhood and awareness. In terms of time you have many bodies, as you are born and reborn in earth experience. Your consciousness straddles those existences, and even the atoms and molecules within your present body contain the coded knowledge of those other (really simultaneous) forms. These units of consciousness are within all physical matter, containing their own memories. Both biologically and psychically, then, you are aware of your multipersonhood.

(10:45.) Now: Your system does not include the kind of experience mentioned earlier (in this session), where the body is able to contain in one lifetime the experience of many selves. It uses a time context instead, with each self given a body and a time; but a knowledge of the ideas of multipersonhood could help you realize that you have available many abilities not being used, latent to you but still important in your entire identity, and significant enough to you personally to be developed.

(Long pause, one of many.) All consciousness, in all of its forms, exists at once. It is difficult, without appearing to contradict myself, to explain. Go back to our bulb and flower. In basic terms they exist at once. In your terms, however, it is as if the flower-to-be, from its “future” calls back to the bulb and tells it how to make the flower. Memory operates backward and forward in time. The flower — calling back to the bulb, urging it “ahead” and reminding it of its (probable future) development — is like a future self in your terms, or a more highly advanced self, who has the answers and can indeed be quite practically relied upon. The gods can be seen in the same light, only on a larger scale; and understood in that context, they can be relied upon. It is almost a natural tendency to personify the gods while you are caught up in limited ideas of personhood. Larger concepts of personhood will indeed lead you to some glimpse of the truly remarkable gestalts of consciousness from which you constantly emerge.

These are emotional and psychological beings of such richness that your concepts of selfhood force you to dilute them to a degree that you can understand.⁴ Each of your persons is a part of that greater personhood. Again, these ideas alone can help you, so that to some degree you can emotionally and intellectually sense that greater godhood out of which personhood emerges.

(“I don’t know,” Jane said. “The material doesn’t seem like a book, but when I started getting stuff in my sleep after the last two sessions, I did wonder …” I had to laugh: She hadn’t mentioned her own suspicions to me. At the same time I thought she might be putting up barriers to the idea of another Seth book so soon, since we still have editorial work to do for the last one, Personal Reality [see Note I for the 682nd session]. “Maybe these sessions are for your own writing,” Jane speculated. “I love them, though — but another book? Now?”

(2. “Are these units of consciousness that Seth started talking about in the last session the same as the EE units he described in Seth Speaks, a development of that original idea, or what?” [See Note 3 for Session 682.]

(3. “It would be nice if Seth would say something about the dream I had the night before last, in which I think I contacted my [deceased] mother for the second time.” Yesterday I wrote an account of the experience for use in the book I’ve started on my own: Through My Eyes. Seth broached the idea of Through My Eyes in Chapter 6 of Personal Reality. I enjoy working on the project, and have had particularly strong urges to do so since the death of my mother three months ago. In writing about my parents, I discovered that I wrote about my own childhood. See the notes preceding the 679th session; the questions I asked then helped initiate this series of sessions.

(“If it’s a source book for me, it can be for others, too.” I added that I didn’t care how “tough” or difficult a book it might be — if such was needed to get Seth’s ideas across, then okay. Again, I had to laugh at Jane. It was obvious that she was pleased with this new project, that the successes of Seth Speaks and Personal Reality had given her a strong confidence in Seth’s and her own abilities; yet she was starting right in with questions:

2. In connection with Seth’s discussion of animals and men here, see his excellent material in Chapter 12 of Personal Reality. Summarizing parts of that chapter very simply: In Session 647 Seth goes into the challenges early man faced as he contended with his own burgeoning consciousness. In Session 648 he discusses animal instinct, health, illness, and suicide, and the eras during which men and animals mixed. For the same session Jane contributed impressions of her own on animal medicine men.

3. A note added later: I found most of the material Seth had delivered since 10:11, but especially at this point, to be strongly reminiscent of a passage in the 657th session in Chapter 15 of Personal Reality. I’ve put together these excerpts from that session: “Each of your reincarnational selves has its own ‘points of power,’ or successive moments, in which it materializes daily existence in a linear manner from all the probabilities available to it. In a way that will be explained in another book, there is a kind of coincidence with all of these present points of power that exists between you and your ‘reincarnational’ selves. There is a constant interaction in this multidimensional point of power, therefore, so that in your terms, one incarnated self draws from all of the others what abilities it wants. These selves are different counterparts [my emphasis] of yourself in creaturehood, experiencing bodily reality; but at the same time your organism shuts out the simultaneous nature of experience.”