“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.

Because of its position it has great powers of communication, both as a receiver and as a sender. Unfortunately, science as it has developed in your time has resulted in a mistrust of the individual, and saddled him or her with a sense of powerlessness, subjectively, even while it has added a seeming sense of objective power. I say that it has seemingly added a sense of objective power (intently during a fast delivery). For instance, your sophisticated techniques allow you to say that conditions are right for a tornado, and you will have a tornado watch (as we had in our Elmira area not long ago), or your instruments will pick up faint earthquake tremors, and following fault lines you will then “predict” that an earthquake will appear in another area. So it seems that you have some power over your environment. The individual person can then prepare for a potential disaster. It seems that you can seed the clouds with chemicals and bring forth rain when it is needed, and therefore obtain a power over the environment that is quite practical. You believe that you need scientific paraphernalia to achieve such ends — yet many animals are aware of such phenomena, and without such instruments. And mankind itself is innately equipped to “foresee” such potential disasters.

I am simply suggesting that you become more natural. Because science has made an effective barrier to that method of approach, the power seems to reside in the gadgets rather than in man. Man no longer identifies with a storm, for example, and has lost his sense of relationship with it, and therefore his natural power over it. The same applies to storms of the psyche. The dream-art scientist, the true mental physicist, the complete physician — such designations represent the kinds of training that could allow you to understand the unknown, and therefore the known reality, and so become aware of the blueprints that exist behind the physical universe. The proof is in the pudding, of course. Largely, it seems that your techniques work a good deal of the time. Let us look at medicine, for instance.

They may have been “cured” whether or not they had treatment, and gone on to lead productive lives. You do not know. A man or woman who is ready to die, if saved from one disease will promptly get another, or find a way of fulfilling that desire. Your problem there rests with the will to live, and with the mechanics of the psyche. The complete physician would try to understand the inner mechanics of vitality and, as best he could, learn to encourage these.

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.”