“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In Note 6 for the last session I wrote quite easily that Jane and I felt “no physical or emotional threat” as we considered the vastness of the inner universe described by Seth. While we talked after supper tonight, however, I discovered to my surprise that Jane did entertain some doubtful thoughts on our places within this great organization of things. She also questioned the emotional value of the material on probabilities. But then, she added, her feelings stemmed from her being blue today.

(Actually, Jane continued, she found the material on probabilities intellectually stimulating, while wondering about its emotional connotations — the inferences that she was but one of countless billions of creatures, “blinking on and off like lights in all of those probable worlds …” What value was there to the tiny individual? she asked herself.

The experience of any given unit, constantly changing, affects all other units … Give us time … It is difficult to explain because your concepts of selfhood are so limited … These units contain within themselves, in your terms, all “latent” identities, but not in a predetermined fashion. Selves may be quite independent within the framework of their own reality, while still being a part of a larger reality in which their independence works not only for their own benefit, but for the sake of a greater structure.

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 same thing with variations happened with your own race, and for that matter is happening. In the past as you think of it historically, several groups experimented along those lines. At those times the individual consciousness became so entranced with its own experiences, however, that the clear-cut, steady, and conscious communication with the mass consciousness went underground, so to speak. It became available to those who looked for it, but the same kinds of psychological organization did not result on those occasions.²

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

I do not want to get involved in a discussion of “levels,” in which progression is supposed to occur from one to the other. All such discussions are based upon your idea of one-personhood, consecutive time, and limited versions of the soul. There are red, yellow, and violet flowers. One is not more progressed than the others, but each is different.

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.

(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.

(11:13. Jane had been really under during another long delivery. She seemed to come out of her trance easily enough, but her eyes rolled up a few times. Her rocker had crept three feet to her left.

(“I’ve got a few questions,” I said after she’d rested a bit. “I was going to ask them during the delivery, but I’m afraid to hear the answers — at least to the first two.” I was only half joking. I’d had the first question in mind since Seth had come through with the 679th session two weeks ago:

(“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?”

(Pause, eyes wide, staring at me.) Now for your dream. You are of course making contact with your mother. She is beginning to stir, as you surmised. Ruburt’s (written) comments about the dream are also pertinent, showing your own caution. None of these encounters have been normally emotional ones, for example, but glimpses in which there was no communication in ordinary terms.

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.”

Jane and I placed no particular emphasis upon this information when Seth came through with it, but in retrospect we realized that it contains two significant points: Seth’s reference to “another book,” which we think is “Unknown” Reality, and his use of the word “counterparts.” In its ordinary dictionary sense, the term has appeared a few times in the sessions, but Seth’s use of it in the passage quoted above has a special implication, I think; one that Jane and I missed at the time of its reception. For in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, Seth’s concept of counterparts certainly takes on its own unique meaning within his study of personhood. (Although not bringing up his ideas of reincarnation or points of power in the 683rd session, Seth implied both of those qualities in many parts of that material.)

As I write this note, I’m struck by a curious connection I feel but find almost impossible to explain in words, let alone simply — that while Seth’s mention of “another book” in Session 657 may refer to “Unknown” Reality, it’s also echoed in the first question I asked Jane at break in tonight’s session. Yet how can this be, I wonder, since when the 683rd session was held I didn’t have Session 657 in mind; and when the 657th was delivered I had no ordinary way of knowing I’d have the question to ask in the 683rd. I’m unwilling to ascribe the “conventional” notions of precognition or retrocognition to such a tenuous relationship between the two sessions. Such odd connections have arisen before in the Seth material. Usually I simply recognize their existence and my inability to think clearly about them, and go on from there.

“Linden and his wife were close to their present physical ages in the dream, a year or so younger than I am, at 54, but Stella looked to be a few years younger than she should have been [she died at 81]. I know I created my dream image of her to make our communication understandable to me — yet I felt that she was alive, in our terms and in hers. My mother was obviously in control of her faculties, even though she appeared to be a little distraught … The fact that she looked past me speaks of some sort of barrier, or distance, between us even in the dream state. This could be for my own protection, I think….”