“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now there are books programming out-of-body activity; millions of you are told that when you leave your body you will meet this demon or that demon, or this or that angry god. So, instead, we will form a free city to which those travelers can come, and where those who enter can read books about Buddhism if they prefer, or play at being Catholic. There will also be certain beloved traps set about the city, that will be of an enlightening nature … Now listen: You think there is nothing intrinsically impossible about building a platform in [your] space … I am suggesting, then, a platform in inner reality. It is as valid — far more valid — as an orbiting city in the sky, in physical terms, and it challenges your creative abilities much more. You need a good challenge — it is fun! Not because you should do it, but because you desire it … It is a great creative challenge that you can throw down to yourselves from your future selves.

(Perhaps I put this appendix together as I did partly because Jane herself isn’t much turned on by reincarnational concepts, although she does like the way Seth insists upon the unlimited attributes of each personality; and within such a “simultaneous” framework there’s plenty of room for probable selves, reincarnational selves, and [added later] counterpart selves.²

(Then from Seth himself:) In one sense meeting with you costs me little energy, it is true. On the other hand the effort to communicate explanations does involve a very real endeavor on my part. And so you are not the only ones who grow weary in this respect. As I have said, feeling is action, and in my communications to you feeling plays a strong part.

(From here on I’ll start occasionally presenting excerpts from a few of the sessions Jane has delivered in her ESP class.²⁵ I’ve saved some of this material for a considerable time. More often than not I wasn’t present when Seth produced his material, and in all cases it was recorded by students; Jane meets with them on Tuesday evening, when I’m usually occupied typing Monday night’s private session [or book material, often] from my own notes.

(From my notes at the close of the 700th session for May 29, 1974, in Volume 1: “In our case,” Seth said a bit later, “Ruburt almost ‘becomes’ the material he receives from me. If certain other beneficial alterations occur, and further understanding on Ruburt’s part, we may be able to meet at other levels of consciousness — in the dream state, when he is not cooperating in the production of our book material.” For Jane has never met Seth, face to face, you might say, in a dream. The closest she’s come to this situation is in giving a session for him in the dream state, as she does in waking life.

(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.

2. Seth began his material on counterpart selves late next month, in the 721st session. Out of that session grew Appendix 21. The material in Appendix 18, then, is intended to further enrich the counterpart information in Session 721, as well as in its appendix.

20. In this appendix, the presentations from sessions 28 and 83 contain Seth’s comments as to whether he’s “a secondary or split personality of Ruburt’s” (to quote him from the latter). On her own, Jane expressed concern about secondary personalities in Chapter 6 of The Seth Material; see her account of our meetings with Dr. Instream. Additional, related material can be found in Chapter 2 of The Coming of Seth, and in the sessions dealing with “Augustus” in Chapter 6 of Personal Reality.

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.