“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To me this [reincarnational and family material] is all so obvious that I almost hesitate to mention it, but this is because I tend to forget what human existence on your plane actually involves….

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

(From the ESP class session for April 20, 1971:) I am very afraid to tell [all of] you that I have forgotten what I considered to be secrets through the lives I have lived. I certainly know that like any of you I have not always been charitable in the past. I know that I have hated one parent or another. I know, certainly, that once I plundered in the wages of war. I do not come to you as someone who does not know what it is like to be human,²⁶ and in those personality characteristics that I use when I speak to you, I show you that the emotional life continues….

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.

(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.

In certain terms, and in certain terms only, and speaking now as the psychological bridge personality, then what you perceive in me and these abilities represents a portion of Ruburt that is utterly free in those directions — a portion of the human mind, as you understand it, goes beyond the threshold of itself into other dimensions of actuality; then, as best it can, it translates what it learns, sees, and experiences. It goes out of itself — it launches itself on paths that it does not understand, taking journeys that even Ruburt does not understand; and yet, that one portion of Ruburt’s human personality is that free. And so you can see what happens!

Ruburt provided himself with a background in which a parent (Jane’s mother) was steadily, chronically ill,³² and in which the medical profession with its beliefs was in constant sight. His mother was not medically neglected. His background included far more than sickness and the medical profession, however, but Ruburt knew that the conventional medical framework was not the answer to human ills. As you became more and more incapacitated, the trigger was set to find another solution. Psychic structures interweave, and realities do, one through the other (as Jane had written a few hours before the session).

26. Although in that 1971 class Seth stressed his experiences with the human condition through reincarnation, in 1964 he’d had this to say: “To me this [reincarnational and family material] is all so obvious that I almost hesitate to mention it, but this is because I tend to forget what human experience on your plane actually involves.” (See the excerpts from the 27th session in this appendix.) In that early session Seth spoke to me alone; in class he faced a large group. I’d say that from his position or focus as an “energy personality essence” both attitudes are true, rather than contradictory — and that one or the other predominated according to the circumstances and subject matter of the session involved. I don’t think the time gap between the two sessions — seven years — was a factor.

By then I’d lost many months from my job as a commercial artist, which was work I’d returned to several years earlier to help ease our financial pressures. I was 44 years old — and, as I recognized after the sessions began, at a point in life where I greatly needed more penetrating insights into the meaning of existence. So did Jane, even though she was almost 10 years younger. As the sessions became part of our joint reality, we gradually came to understand that the illness I struggled with was a disguised expression of rebellion for both of us. We were very dissatisfied with our status quo: After years of work, Jane had managed to publish but a few poems and a few pieces of science fantasy (several short stories and two brief novels), and in my own view I wasn’t making it as the kind of artist I wanted to be. We were driven to know more — about art, about writing, about the human condition, about everything. My own need, as well as Jane’s, struck deep responses within her psyche.

32. In Volume 1, see Session 679 (with its Note 4, among others) for material on Jane’s early years with her mother. I often remind myself that from her earliest years Jane lived in an atmosphere permeated by the fact of illness, while by contrast my background in that respect was much more ordinary. Growing up, she was “frightened most of the time,” Jane told me as I prepared this note: She often lived alone with her bedridden mother, such periods being punctuated by a succession of itinerant housekeepers appointed by the welfare department. She soon became strongly imprinted by human frailty and vulnerability.