“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Speaking of names, this is the time to remind all that Seth calls both Jane and me by male names: Ruburt and Joseph. Why does he speak of Jane as a male — and so as “he” and “him?” In Note 6 for Session 679, in Volume 1, I quoted Seth from the 12th session for January 2, 1964:) Sex, regardless of all your fleshy tales, is a psychic phenomenon, merely certain qualities which you call male and female. The qualities are real, however, and permeate other planes as well as your own. They are opposites which are nevertheless complementary, and which merge into one. When I say as I have that the overall entity [or whole self] is neither male nor female, and yet refer to [some] entities by definite male names such as “Ruburt” and “Joseph,” I merely mean that in the overall essence, the [given] entity identifies itself more with the so-called male characteristics than with the female.

Because Ruburt deals in words [as a writer], it is easy for me to communicate in this manner. That is, he automatically translates inner data given by me into coherent, valid, and faithful camouflage⁵ patterns — into words. My information is not actually given as sound. Its transference is instantaneous on Ruburt’s part, and is performed through the workings of the mind, the inner senses,⁶ and the brain.

As for another advancement made, besides dispensing with the material [Ouija] board, Ruburt has achieved a state in which he can receive inner data from me more readily. But beyond this, he is now able in some small way to contact me….

Information like this is sifted through many layers of subconscious conception, and is subsequently colored. People believing in your organized religions color it in a manner that is highly disadvantageous, and that unfortunately adds to existing superstitions. Ruburt’s mind, believe it or not, is much like my own — though, if you’ll forgive me, in a very limited fashion. Therefore the distortions are much less distortive, much less harmful, and more easily discovered and cleared … Others less perfectionist than myself are content with more distortion. I am not. Ruburt’s Idea Construction⁹ was rather amazing. The inner senses provided him with much, but nevertheless the ideas contained in it represented an achievement of the conscious mind. I was drawn by this to realize that he was ready for me.

(From the 33rd session for March 9, 1964:) I do not bring about the trance state in the manner of which you [Joseph] are speaking. Ruburt switches on another channel, through which my essence can enter more readily. This certainly does involve a looking inward on his part, but it is not self-hypnosis in usual terms — merely a focusing upon an objective inner stimulus … Any such signs (as the powerful, deeper Seth voice) involve camouflage patterns, and do not actually represent direct experience. This is not my voice, for example. It is a representation or approximation of my voice for your edification. Furthermore, in your terms I do not have a voice. But it is a valid representation, and if I say so myself — that’s a pun — the voice is much like the one I would use….

(From the 83rd session for August 31, 1964:) Man sees not even half of the whole entity which is himself. It is true that on this journey [with the sessions] discipline, some caution and understanding, and much courage, is demanded. This is as it should be. I am helping you in this … You are both (meaning Jane and me) peculiarly suited for such a pursuit, with a combination of intuitiveness, basic psychic facility, and yet integrated inner identities … I also want to add that I am not a control, as mediums speak of controls. I am not, as I believe I have mentioned, a secondary or split personality of Ruburt’s. For example, I am not a conglomeration of male tendencies that have collected themselves into a subsidiary personality that struggles for recognition or release. I say that I am an energy personality essence, since that is what I am … My name for him is Ruburt,¹⁵ which happens to be a male name simply because it is the closest translation, in your terms, for the name of the whole self or entity of which he is now a self-conscious part.

(From the 211th session for November 24, 1965:) First of all, as far as the hands are concerned, to be left- or right-handed has to do with inner mechanisms and brain patterns that come first, before the motions of the hands. Characteristically I operated in certain manners that resulted in the primary use of my left hand, when I was focused within physical matter.

(From the 242nd session for March 16, 1966:) The ego is not the most powerful or the most knowledgeable portion of the self. It is simply a well-specialized part of the personality, fully equipped to operate under certain circumstances²¹ … When those conditions no longer exist [after “death”], then other layers of the self take over the dominant position, and the personality realigns its psychological components. The ego does not disappear, however; it merely takes a back seat in some respects, as your own subconscious does during physical existence. The ego is under the control of what may loosely be called “the inner self.” The survival or nonphysical personality has somewhat the same relationship to the ego as the dreaming personality has to it in physical life.

The nonphysical personality does not think in terms of words, but experiences concepts in a much more direct manner. This sort of thing simply could not be understood by the physically focused individual … The survival personality’s inner self gives this reassembled ego ideas in the same way that, often, the subconscious gives the ego concepts in physical existence. This reassembled ego then attempts to perceive these insights in terms of sense perceptions, which are sent to the physical individual at the other end. Sometimes the communications are made directly, though they must be sifted through the subconscious of the one who is physical. When that person is trained along these lines, however [as Ruburt is], he or she helps in this process, and a psychological framework, like a bridge,²² is erected that serves to connect the two personalities.

I speak as my whole self to you … since my personality structure is more advanced than is usual for communications from other systems. Therefore, I do not need to adopt a past ego [of my own]. Perhaps because this is not necessary, the psychological bridge is required to make my messages comprehensible to Ruburt. This connecting framework does some of the translating for me that a reassembled ego would do. It delivers information to Ruburt in a way that he can understand. Occasionally [in your tests] I do impress him directly, telepathically (see Note 19), with a concept. When he receives data in the form of images the framework is operating. With my direction, this framework uses Ruburt’s personal associations to direct his impressions toward the correct point. Then when we are successful I insert the right information.²³

(From the 398th session for March 11, 1968:) Personalities are not static things. Entities are eternal. They are not as nicely nor as neatly packaged out, one to a body, as your psychologists believe. They constantly change. They grow. They make decisions. They use the physical body fully, or they partially depart according to their own inner needs and development.

Information must be sifted through the layers of the medium’s personality. Any perception instantly alters the electromagnetic and neurological systems of the perceiver … It is a logistic contradiction to imagine, with your physical systems, that any perception can be received without the perceiver’s inner situation being altered. I am trying to make it as clear as possible: Information automatically blends with, is intermingled with, and enmeshed with, the entire physically valid structure of the personality.

The voice mechanism, unfortunately, is something that we must work with, and to get my own personality across through the female image and vocal chords, certain adjustments must be made. Beyond this, however, as I have mentioned before in class, it is not out of the inner sense of my invisible heart, but out of the depths of your own psychologies that you make me into a wise old man, and project upon me the authority images that lurk in your own minds. I have always tried to keep you from making this error, and sought to release from within yourselves your own abilities.

Now my relationship with you [and Ruburt] is indeed a strange one, since you do not relate to me as you do to each other. The — I hope — delightfully human egotistical characteristics that I show help calm your fears and show you that the self as you think of it continues to exist [after physical death]. I have a reservoir of personality banks upon which I can draw, and as a teacher I use the one that is most effective in any given system of reality; this is the one I use here. It is a portion of myself that is the most closely connected with earthly existence, and it is a self that I liked very well, indeed.

Now, I can be playful because I am not as serious and mystical as the rest of you. I am myself, and if you were yourselves,²⁸ you would not be so self-consciously profound about your beliefs and the nature of your reality. (Humorously, to a certain student:) You would trust your mustache!

(Shortly after Jane finished Seven, the entire idea for what she calls “Aspect Psychology” came to her — an “intuitive construct” that she thought was large enough to contain her experience. At one sitting she wrote 20 or so pages of material in which she understood her relationship with Seth, Seth Two, the Sumari, the characters in Seven, and other psychic concepts — all as aspects of a larger self that was independent of space and time. The aspects represented the dynamics of personality. As Jane wrote, she realized that the questions she had been struggling with in Adventures had triggered a new psychology, a new way of approaching the creative portions of human personality.

(As she probed the Jane-Ruburt-Seth relationship in Adventures, Jane found herself developing her own nomenclature, separate from Seth’s, for many of the concepts she and Seth had experienced over the years. “But I didn’t plan it that way,” she said. “That’s just the way it all came out.” She calls the conscious self the “focus personality,” for instance, since it’s focused in this physical [camouflage] reality. The focus personality is composed of aspects of the “source self” [or entity]. Each aspect exists independently, in its own dimension of actuality, but the aspects’ combined attributes form the basic components of the selves that we know. To Jane, Seth is a ‘personagram” — an actual personality formed in the psyche at the intersection point of the focus personality with another aspect.

(Seth, then, would be a message from the source self except that in this case the messenger is the message, formed into a richly “worded” psychological structure instead of into dry words on, say, a telegram. Seth in sessions would stand for Jane’s Seth Aspect, who does indeed exist in a different kind of reality than ours. But that “invisible” Seth would send out an actual psychological structure that takes over in place of Jane’s, as her own structure voluntarily steps aside during sessions. Earlier in this appendix, see the excerpts on the psychological bridge from the 242nd session.

You set upon this adventure, the two of you. It is meaningless to say that the books are Ruburt’s. Your ideas of “perfection” and love of detail, or if you prefer, your feeling for the significance of detail that appears exteriorized in your notes, is as present in the inner consistency of the material itself as given by me.

6. By the time the 22nd session was held Seth had mentioned the inner senses upon occasion, but had given us a breakdown on just the first one: Inner Vibrational Touch. Consciously, then, we had no way of appreciating what important and interesting parts those “senses leading to an inner reality” were to play in the material over the years. In Chapter 19 of The Seth Material Jane quoted Seth on the nine inner senses he’s described so far.

(I should note that Jane’s own use of that first inner sense, demonstrated in the example she gives in Chapter 19, reflects a very strong facet of her psychic ability that she seldom indulges. Her reluctance here is closely connected to her deep feelings about personal privacy.)

“The entity itself does not have to keep constant check on its personalities, because in each one there is an inner self-conscious part that knows its origin. I have mentioned before that some part of you knows exactly how much oxygen the lungs breathe, and how much energy it takes to pace a floor, and this is the part of you of which I spoke. It is the self-conscious part that receives all inner data.

“… the part that translates inner data sifts it down through the subconscious, which is a barrier and also a threshold to the present camouflage personality. I have said that the topmost part of the subconscious contains personal memories, that beneath these are racial memories, and so forth. Things are simply not layered in the way I speak of them, but continuing with the necessary analogy, on the other side of (or beneath, to you) the racial memories, you no longer exist within your plane; you look out upon another with the face of this other self-conscious part of you. This part receives inner data, is in contact with the entity to some greater degree than you are in contact with your dreams, and actually directs all of the important functions that you think are either automatically or unconsciously controlled.

“When such abilities as telepathy occur, this telepathic function is carried on continually by this other self-conscious part of you; but as a rule you act upon those data without the knowledge of the conscious self with which you are familiar.

(With a laugh:) “There is of course an apparent contradiction here, but it is only apparent — your dilemma being this: If you have another self-conscious self, then why aren’t you aware of it?

“At the same time — and this is the difficult part to explain — neither of the two faces would ever see the other world. They would not [usually] be aware of each other, and yet each would be fully self-conscious.”

17. For many readers Seth’s remarks about the anima and the animus will require a bit of explaining. Carl Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, postulated that the unconscious of the male contains a female, archetypal (or typical, instinctive) figure called the “anima”; the correlative male form in the unconscious of the female Jung called the “animus.” In Session 119, then, Seth comments on how Jane herself has an animus — the hidden male within — and on how Ruburt, that larger “male” entity of which she is a “self-conscious part,” contains an anima, or hidden female. (See the excerpts in this appendix from the 83rd session.) The contrasts are most interesting. From this information I infer that the entity or whole self of each of us, regardless of our current, individual sexual orientation, contains its own counterbalancing male or female quality, whichever the case may be. Seth hasn’t said so yet — nor have we asked him — but I suspect that an energy gestalt like the entity is much more aware than we can be of its “hidden” opposite-sex form — or forms; for there may be many of them.

In Seth Speaks, Seth developed Jung’s ideas about the anima and the animus by stating that such other-sex qualities or personifications within each of us actually represent memories of past lives. (Jung himself thought the questions of reincarnation, and of karma [or, roughly, destiny or fate], to be “obscure” — he couldn’t be sure of the existence of such phenomena.) From Session 555 for October 21, 1970: “The anima and the animus … are highly charged psychically, and also appear in the dream state. They operate as compensations and reminders to prevent you from overidentifying yourself with your present physical body.” And from Session 556: “The reality of the anima and the animus is far deeper than Jung supposed. Symbolically speaking, the two together represent the whole self with its diverse abilities, desires, and characteristics … Personality as you know it cannot be understood unless the true meaning of the anima and the animus is taken into consideration.”

“There are a few points of a general nature that I would like to make. Ruburt has been reading Jung, though not consistently. The libido does not originate in the subconscious of the present personality. It begins instead in the energy of the entity and inner self, and is directed by means of the inner senses — outward, so to speak, through the deeper layers of the individual subconscious mind, then through the outer or personal areas.

“Some of these conditions could be called the result of psychological atmospheres that surround the earth, say. I do not travel physically in a UFO (with amusement), and yet my mental or psychic journeys must occur in a medium of some kind. There are rhythmic activities in that atmosphere that I count upon and use, as for example a sea captain might use the rhythm of the waves for his voyages. Those inner atmospheric ‘waves’ have a certain regularity. They are more intense at certain times than others.”