“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I feel no great responsibility for any of your beings. [If I did] then I would be denying you your own power, and therefore seemingly building my own … I am here because I enjoy it. I am a teacher, and because I am a teacher I love to teach. A person who loves to teach needs people who love to learn. That is why I am here and why you are here … My view of reality is different from your own, and that is fine, and so I can teach. A true teacher allows you to learn from yourself. I enjoy the great vitality and exuberance of your reality, and our city will have joy and exuberance. Now joy sounds quite acceptable, but (with amusement) our city will also have fun — which in many spiritual circles is not so acceptable!

(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.

In the beginning, for example, there is always a distortion of material by the person who receives it, at least on the topmost subconscious level. So an individual whose personal prejudices are at a minimum is excellent. If, for example, Ruburt’s prejudices happen to lie along lines which do not contradict what I know to be true, then all the better, and there is much less resistance.

(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.

(To me:) You have often said that the [Seth] books were Ruburt’s. That is true. Yet to a certain degree it is also a simplification.

10. Well, obviously, it’s true so far at least that Seth will be “accessible” for the present lifetimes of Jane and me….

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.

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.”

“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.

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.

Then in my note at 10:20 I wrote: “I thought it very interesting that Seth had talked about subatomic waves and particles in the last paragraph of his delivery tonight. Such ideas involve the physicists’ ongoing conception of the duality of nature. For instance: Is light made up of waves or particles? A contemporary accommodation, called complementarity, leads experimenters to accept results that show either aspect to be true.”

37. In Volume 1, see Session 700. Seth at 9:53: “The true art of dreaming is a science long forgotten by your world. Such an art, pursued, trains the mind in a new kind of consciousness — one that is equally at home in either [exterior or interior] existence, well grounded and secure in each.”

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.”