“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.”

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?

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

(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.

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?”

(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.”