“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Medicine would gently and expertly encourage healing processes as it more fully understood the psyche’s great emotional being and needs. Learning would take advantage of the latent inner knowledge of the subjective self, and help it interpret itself in terms of physical life. The dream state would be seen as an inexhaustible fountain of information. Efforts could then be made to understand and interpret private symbolism, and individuals within a society would be taught to take advantage of their own inner data to enrich their personal lives and help the community.

Now all of this certainly sounds unscientific to many people, yet most of my readers have already picked up a different version of the nature of science, or they would not be reading this book to begin with. The private oracle: What does that mean? And what does it have to do with the unknown reality? More, what does it have to do with the practical world? The private oracle is the voice of the inner multidimensional self — the part of each person not fully contained in his or her personhood, the part of the unknown self-structure out of which personhood, with its physical alliance, springs. Basically that portion of the psyche is outside of space and time, while enabling you to operate in it.⁴ It deals intimately with probabilities — (louder:) the source of all predictable action.

Each individual is a universe in a small package. (A one-minute pause.) As the physical planets move in order while being individual, so there can be a social order that is based upon the integrity of the individual. But that order would recognize the inner validity that is within the self; and the inner order, unseen, that forms the integrity of the physical body, likewise would form the integrity of the social body. The self, the individual, being its fulfilled self, would automatically function for the good of itself and for the good of society. The individual’s good, therefore, is the society’s good, and represents spiritual and physical fulfillment. This presupposes, however, an understanding of the inner self and an exploration into the unknown reality of the individual psyche.

4. A note added later: Jane dealt with her “own” ideas of the inner multidimensional self in Part 2 of her Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology. See chapters 10 and 11, among others. Seth’s private oracle is analogous to her basic nonphysical source self, from which numerous Aspect selves simultaneously emerge into various realities. All Aspects of a source self are in communication with each other, even if unconsciously. The Aspect self that appears in our reality is the focus personality, “earthized” in physical form. I made a number of diagrams to illustrate Jane’s material in Part 2 of Adventures, and several of these show a schematic source self with its attendant Aspects.

In very simplified terms, then, Jane regards Seth as a personagram, “a multidimensional personification of another Aspect of the entity or source self, as expressed through the medium.” Aspects like Seth, she wrote in Chapter 11, “would have to communicate through the psychic fabric of the focus personality. They would have to appear in line with our idea of personhood, though their own reality might exist in quite different terms. I think that I always sensed this about Seth. It wasn’t that I mistrusted the Seth personality, but I felt it was a personification of something else — and that ‘something else’ wasn’t a person in our terms … Yet in an odd way I felt that he was more than that, or represented more; and that his psychological reality straddled worlds … I sensed a multidimensionality of personality that I couldn’t define.”