“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I finally decided that the best way to present the variety of material desired, whether from Seth, Jane, or myself, was in chronological order, letting a composite picture emerge as the work progresses. This system automatically makes room for any references in Volume 1. In actuality the chronology begins long before “Unknown” Reality was started, and continues well beyond the date of its ending, in April 1975. Since the excerpts are still more representative than complete, however, due to the accumulated mass of information available, my own choices enter in: ESP class data are quoted a number of times; included is material summarizing Jane’s own theories about the Seth phenomena, as she worked them out in her recently completed Adventures in Consciousness; but reincarnation, while mentioned often, isn’t stressed in terms of particulars — that is, I refer to Seth’s statements that he, Jane and I led closely involved lives in Denmark in the 1600’s, but those lives aren’t studied per se. Within our ordinary context of linear time I think of reincarnation, even though in Seth’s terms it’s really a simultaneous phenomenon, as being further away, or more removed, from us physical creatures than the more “immediate” psychic connections and mechanics I want to show as linking Seth, Jane, and myself. And also because of that sense of removal, Seth Two¹ is hardly mentioned at all.

I do depend upon Ruburt’s willingness to dissociate.¹² There is no doubt that at times he is unaware of his surroundings during a session. However, this is no more binding upon him than autosuggestion. It is a phenomenon in which he gives consent, and he could, at any time and in a split second, return his conscious attention upon his physical environment.

(From the 54th session for May 18, 1964:) Your Ruburt was, indeed, Seth … I have promised to give you more material dealing with the psychic construction of the entity, and its relationship with its various [physical] personalities. In the beginning, I could not tell you in so many words that Ruburt is myself, because you would have leaped to the conclusion that I was Ruburt’s subconscious mind, and this is not so.

Scientists have glimpsed the complications of the human body. They have scarcely glimpsed the complicated realities of the mind.

(Jane’s account of “a year of testing” Seth’s [and her own] psychic abilities is given in chapters 6 through 8 of The Seth Material. The tests began with the 179th session for August 18, 1965] and finally ended with the 310th session for January 9, 1967, although actually most of them were held during the year following their inception. All that work can’t be described here, but we accomplished our main goal: exploring from new angles the relationships involving Jane, Seth, and our physical [camouflage] reality.

(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.

Now and then with Ruburt, when I am allowed to manifest myself to a smaller or lesser degree, my own habits therefore show through, for I manipulate his muscles in a different way than he does. But, scientifically, this would not be proof of my existence as an independent personality who has survived physical death. Not that this concerns me, for it does not … Or, if you are thinking in terms of secondary personalities,²⁰ you can prove nothing one way or another. A secondary personality could indeed use gestures that are different [from Ruburt’s]. Either way, this would be no proof as to my independent nature. (With humor:) I am glad to see that it has been bothering you. You have had a good think session!

(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.

When communication takes place between a survival personality and one who exists within the physical system, this involves a reshuffling on the part of the survival personality, where the ego is momentarily given greater reign … If this was not done, then in most cases communication would not be possible, just because the survival personality would have such difficulty impressing the personality who was still ego-oriented within the physical system.

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.

(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.

When psychic gestalts are formed they are not static. They make different alliances until they find their place in a whole identity that serves their purposes, or are strong enough to become indestructible. They are always becoming. They are not closed units.

(Now I’ll refer the reader to Chapter 20 of Jane’s The Seth Material. She called the chapter “Personal Evaluations — Who or What is Seth?” In it she made a number of excellent points concerning her relationship with Seth and Seth Two; for example: “If physical life evolves [in ordinary terms], why not consciousness itself?” The questions we had at the time can be found throughout the chapter. Indeed, we still have many of them — or, I should note, we’re still intrigued by the latest versions of those “old” questions, for like consciousness itself they’re endless in their ramifications. But here I want to call attention mainly to the excerpt in Chapter 20 that Jane presented from the 458th session for January 20, 1969. Seth discussed the psychological bridge Jane and he have created between themselves for purposes of communication; yet most of his material came through in response to my question about his availability to us. “We [Rob and I] both know that some sessions seem more ‘immediate’ than others, and now as Seth continued we saw why,” Jane wrote in Chapter 20. Seth, briefly, from the 458th session:)

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.

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.

(In July 1971 Jane began a book to be called Adventures in Consciousness, based on the experiences of her students in ESP class. Within a few days Seth mentioned it while dictating Chapter 21 of Seth Speaks: See the 587th session. Class was now providing a wealth of material on reincarnation, various states of consciousness, and out-of-body travel. It was also bombarding Jane with questions for which she found no acceptable answers. Her own intuitive experiences were accelerating, and these, she felt, were more and more outgrowing the ordinary concepts of psychology.

(Jane was particularly bothered by people’s attitudes about Seth, for they often considered him as a “spirit guide” in conventional spiritualistic terms. Though almost eight years had passed since Seth had first come through, she’d known for some time that she wanted to explore the whole phenomenon more deeply. Jane believed Seth when he told us he was an “energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical reality” — she just wanted to know more about what he meant by that statement. She was certain, she wrote, that far more than Seth’s being a spirit guide was involved, that “in larger terms the abilities of living personality are connected with … other facets of creative consciousness.”

(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.

(From the 775th session for May 10, 1976:) Bits of your consciousnesses,³⁴ Joseph and Ruburt, go out through these books. I am not speaking symbolically. Those portions will mix with the consciousness of others. Portions of your intent and purpose become theirs. My own psychological reality is not particleized. My identity includes the identities of many others, and they each operate in their own fashion. In those terms I am a wave formation. More specifically, however, and to a lesser degree, each physical person operates partially as a particleized being, and partially in terms of a wave.³⁵ But identity, being itself inviolate, is on the other hand everchanging — and there is, in the larger framework of reality, no contradiction.

9. Jane produced her manuscript, The Physical Universe as Idea Construction, three months before the sessions began. That key event is briefly described in Volume 1. See Note 7 for Session 679.

13. Following his comments about his reassembly in our reality, Seth went into some analogous material (in that 28th session) that I’ve always wanted to see published. In part, then: “Condensed time is the time felt or experienced by the entity, while any of its given personalities ‘live’ — and you had better put that in quotes — on a plane of physical materializations. To go into this a bit further, many men have said that life was a dream. They were true to the facts in one strong regard, and yet far afield as far as the main issue is concerned.

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.”

“We have spoken of the biological interdependence and cooperation among organisms in your physical universe. The appearance of an individual into the physical realm is aided by the psychic collaboration of individuals on your plane. Almost at once the new libido takes up its adopted duty of maintaining the physical universe, along with all others. If it did not do so it would not exist for long. Cooperation on all levels is the necessity on all planes.

“It is true that the outward manifestations of the libido are directed toward the physical world, but until its source is seen, not in the topmost subconscious layers of the individual, and not even in the racial subconscious, but within the entity itself, then man will not know himself.

24. In the 464th session I made sure that I asked Seth to elaborate upon his statement in the last session: “The slightest perception alters every atom within your body.” He came through with his answer just before first break:

“Perceptions in general physical terms usually seem to involve information picked up from an arbitrarily designated structure, of an event seemingly occurring in another structure outside of itself. In the entire act of perception, however, there is a oneness and a unity between the seemingly objectively perceived event and the perceiver.

Yet, we fully agree with Seth — that like any other personality Jane chose her physical environment before birth, planning to meet certain challenges within that setting.

35. Seth’s material in this excerpt reminded me strongly of certain passages of his (and mine) in the 702nd session in Volume 1: “As long as you think in terms of [subatomic] particles, you are basically off the track — or even when you think in terms of waves. The idea of interrelated fields comes closer, of course, yet even here you are simply changing one kind of term for one like it, only slightly different. In all of these cases you are ignoring the reality of consciousness, and its gestalt formation and manifestations. Until you perceive the innate consciousness behind any ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ manifestations, then, you put a definite barrier to your own knowledge.”

“Consciousness forms patterns of identities. They move faster than the speed of light. They can be in more than one place at one time. (See notes 5 and 6 for Session 702.) They can operate in a freewheeling fashion as identities in themselves, or as ‘psychological particles.’ They can also operate in a wavelike fashion, flowing through other such particles. They can form together into endless, infinite combinations, forming psychological gestalts. Certain portions of these gestalts can then operate as ‘psychological particles’ in time and space, while other portions operate in a wavelike manner outside of time and space. These represent the unconscious elements of the species, which become ‘particleized’ in physical existence.”

Since this session was held almost 13 months after “Unknown” Reality was completed, I can look back and note that Seth developed the statement on reincarnation in his material on counterparts; this begins with Session 721 in Section 5. Appendix 21 grew out of that session. In that same section, the 725th session (with Note 4) contains additional information on particles, identities, and psychological gestalts.

And from Session 704: “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 beyond the physical universe.”

“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.”