“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You must therefore explore the psyche, the living consciousness. It will lead you to the withinness. This is not an impractical, but very practical, endeavor in all areas. Scientifically, such studies would vastly enlarge your concepts so that a loving technology could follow the most beautiful contours of the mind, rising on the natural mountains of human abilities and then more easily into fulfillment.

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.

I am aware that some of this sounds “retrogressive,” for I am even suggesting a situation in which politicians or statesmen would learn to “dream wisely” — and become aware of the psyche, the mass psyche, of their people, and tune into the “private oracle.”

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.

(10:16.) Your physicians can point to lives saved by sophisticated technology. You can point to diseases stamped out because of inoculations or other preventive measures, such as the intake of certain vitamins, or sanitary procedures. It seems the worst kind of idiocy to suggest that the individual has any kind of effective protection against illness or disease. (Long pause.) Almost anyone can name a family member or friend who died 30 or 40 years ago of a disease that is now completely conquered. It seems that such lives would have been saved with modern procedures. In your society a medical checkup is a must every so often.

Again, many can thankfully praise a given doctor for discovering a disease condition “in time,” so that effective countering measures were taken and the disease was eliminated. You cannot know for sure, of course, what would have happened otherwise. You cannot know for sure what happened to those people who wanted to die. If they did not die of the disease, they may have “fallen prey” to an accident, or died in a war, or in a natural disaster.

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.

He would try to ascertain the patterns of the psyche, and follow them. He would encourage the patient to tune into the private oracle in order to ascertain his or her own purposes in physical life, and to reinforce spiritual strength. The complete physician would be an individual, (male or female), who was in superb health, and therefore understood himself the particular dynamics that operate between spiritual vitality and physical well-being. (Intently:) That would be his specialty.

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.

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.”