“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In these sessions the full range of brain waves is utilized as you understand them. Here, in a highly creative, disciplined, and yet spontaneous performance, a situation is set up in which knowledge is obtained from the known frequencies, combined so that consciousness can use itself more fully, reaching into many areas closed to one range of consciousness alone. The various diverse, unique characteristics of each level of awareness are given play. In a way this is like an accelerated, chosen, well-organized “conscious” dream venture, in which Ruburt travels through mediums of consciousness until finally he, still being himself, is nevertheless no longer himself (humorously), but me.

(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.

As I have told you, projection is involved to some extent, both on my part and Ruburt’s. Your (Rob’s) own presence is also important, whether or not you are present at any given session … Now when you watch, say, educational television, you see the teacher, and he speaks. [Actually] you may be watching a film. But the teacher exists whether or not he is speaking at that time, and his message is legitimate … It makes no difference whether or not I am myself speaking through Ruburt now, or whether I did this last night in his sleep, and tonight is a film or playback. Again (with a smile): the medium is the message….

(Later in Chapter 20 of The Seth Material, Jane quoted Seth from the 463rd session for February 3, 1969. While discussing the impossibility of any medium being an absolutely clear channel for paranormal knowledge, even when “in a trance as deep as the Atlantic Ocean,” Seth had some extremely interesting things to say about the nature of perception in general. Presenting a few sentences from that session here serves two purposes: I can remind the reader of important material, and in Note 24 I can offer some unpublished extensions of it from the next 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.

“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.”