“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

(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:

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.

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.)