“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Good evening (whispering.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

Your world, again, is the result of a certain focus of consciousness, without which that world cannot be perceived. Period. The range of consciousness involved is obviously physically oriented, yet within it there are great varieties of consciousness, each experiencing that seemingly objective world from a private perspective. The physical environment is real in different terms to an animal, a fish, a man, or a rock, for example, and different portions of that environment are correspondingly unreal [to each of those forms]. This is highly important.

For example: Say that you have a certain Wilford Jones, who is a character in one of the soap operas. This Wilford, while carrying on within his own drama as, say, a sickly grocer in Iowa, with a mistress he cannot support, and a wife that he must support (with amusement) — this poor, besieged man on station KYU is also aware of all the other programs going on at the other stations. All of the other characters in all of the other plays are also aware of our grocer. There is a constant, creative give-and-take between the day’s various programs. Period.

In their own ways, these are heroes representing the detective who is out to protect good against evil, to set things right. Now these characters exist more vividly in the minds of television viewers than the actors do who play those roles. The actors know themselves as apart from the roles. The viewers, however, identify with the characters. They may even dream about the characters. These have their own kind of superlife because they so clearly represent certain living aspects within each psyche.

The aspects are personified in the character. Through the centuries, in your terms, there have been different personalities, some physical and some not, with whom the species identified. Christ is one of these: in some respects the most ideal detective — in a different context, however — out to save the good and to protect the world from harm. In certain ways man also projected outward the idea of a devil or devils, and for somewhat the same reasons, so that he could identify with what he thought of as the unsavory portions of the psyche as he understood them at any given time. In between there are a multitude of such personalities, all vividly portraying parts of the psyche.

There are many myths connected with my name.⁶ They all represent portions of the psyche as they were understood at various times in man’s history. Those portions were originally projected out of the psyche as it began to understand itself, and personified its abilities and characteristics, forming superheroic characters of one kind or another, to which the psyche could then correspond and relate.

— and a fond good evening. I stop to give you a rest.

(“Yes. Well, thank you, Seth. Good night.”

1. A note added later: Seth puts the “home station of consciousness”‘ analogy to good use in several more sessions for this volume. See the 716th session in Section 5, for instance.

6. About Seth’s reference to the myths connected with his name: Set, or Seth, was an Egyptian god of evil (with an animal’s head) whose complicated origins could, it’s thought, reach back in antiquity to at least 7500 B.C. In Judaism, of course, Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve, after Cain and Abel (Genesis 4 and 5). (As one correspondent wrote us: “Seth is also a Hebrew name meaning ‘appointed’ — i.e., the appointed one.”) However, some very early priestly genealogies omit Cain and Abel, and consider Seth as the oldest son of Adam; in the second century A.D., for instance, the Sethites, who were members of a little-known Gnostic sect, thought of Seth, the son of Adam, as the Messiah. Seth also shows up in writings of the ancient occult religious philosophy, the cabala, which was originated by certain Jewish rabbis who sought to interpret the scriptures through numerical values; the soul of Seth is seen as infusing Moses; he was to reappear as the Messiah….