“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.”

You think of one I-self (spelled) as the primary and ultimate end of evolution. Yet there are, of course, other identities with many such I-selves, each as aware and independent as your own, while also being aware of the existence of a greater identity in which they have their being. Consciousness fulfills itself by knowing itself. The knowledge changes it, in your terms, into a greater gestalt that then tries to fulfill and know itself, and so forth. There have been experiments upon your earth (by consciousness) with both men and animals at a different level than just mentioned, but with that in mind — herds of animals, for example, with each animal quite aware of the joint knowledge of the herd, the dangers to be encountered in any individual territory, and a psychological structure in which the mass consciousness of the herd recognized the individual consciousness of each animal, and protected it.

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?

Your idea of one soul, one self, forms a significance and a selectivity that blinds you to these other realities that are as much “here and now” as your present self. The units of consciousness that compose your physical being alone are aware of those greater significances, to which your limited ideas make you opaque.

(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.

(With emphasis:) Reincarnation simply represents probabilities in a time context (underlined) — portions of the self that are materialized in historical contexts. Period. All kinds of time — backward and forward — emerge from the basic unpredictable nature of consciousness, and are due to “series” of significances. Each self born in time will then pursue its own probable realities from that standpoint. Again, each such self is immediate.

(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.

1. Jane uses “multipersonhood” on the last page of Chapter 11 in her Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology. “But really,” she said, “the whole chapter builds up toward that definition, or idea.” In her view, the quality called multipersonhood encompasses all of the inner personifications, or Aspects, of the source self, which she defines in the Glossary of Adventures as “the ‘unknown’ self, soul, or psyche; the fountainhead of our physical being.” In her own case, then, Seth would be a personification of an Aspect of her source self; but he would also have an existence of his own at other levels of reality.

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.”