“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You could not be consciously aware of those other realities all of the time, and deal with the world that you know. You have several time and space tracks in operation at once, then, but you acknowledge only certain neurological messages physically. Yet there is more to the body than you perceive of it, and this is difficult to explain to you … If you can think of a multidimensional body existing at one time in various realities, and appearing differently within each one while still being whole, then you can get some glimpse of what is involved.³

Now our friend Joseph here was able to handle another reality while still being involved in this one. (To me:) Neurologically, you crossed your messages. You were aware of ghost images that you usually do not recognize, and those were translated into ghost sense data. (To the class:) That is, he knew the black woman was not in the physical room with him in this space and time, running through his studio [where he had the experience]. But in other terms, she was indeed running in another environment that our friend was able to see, and to superimpose over the reality he knew, while keeping both intact.

Now in your terms only, these other counterparts are like latent patterns within your mind. Echoes. How many of you have actually thought of what the unconscious may be? Or, the voices that you hear within your mind or heart? Are they yours? To what counterparts do they belong? And yet each of you, in your own identity, has the right to do precisely as you wish, and to form your own reality….

[Each of] you will create the attributes of reality that interest you and work with them in your own way. If you want to study the nature of religion and do a good job of it, then you must be among other things a skeptic and a believer, and an Indian and a Jew, say. Otherwise you will not understand anything at all, and have a very lopsided picture. And (to a black student) you cannot know what it is like to be black in this culture — you may not agree here — unless you are also white in it…. Now I return you to yourselves and to your counterparts.

(“Well,” I said to Jane after class, as we discussed the Chinese-American situation cited by Seth, “I don’t know about counterpart relationships in other kinds of realities, but it’s certainly obvious that at least some physical counterparts can hate each other …” So the larger self, I thought, would be quite capable of seeking experience through its parts in every way imaginable. Although it might be difficult for us to understand, let alone accept, the whole self or entity must regard all of its counterparts as sublime facets of itself — no matter whether they loved, suffered,⁵ hated, or killed each other or “outsiders.” Within its great reaches it would transform its counterparts’ actions in ways that were, quite possibly, beyond our emotional and intellectual grasp. At the same time, the self would learn and be changed through the challenges and struggles of its human portions.

(So far we’ve been dealing with the idea of counterparts in our own physical reality. By way of contrast, however, Seth stated last month in the 713th session, after 10:32:) Nothing exists outside the psyche, however, that does not exist within it, and there is no unknown world that does not have its psychological or psychic counterpart. (Before that, from Session 712:) To some extent or another, there are counterparts of all realities within your psyche.

(Continuing to trace such references back through the material, I’d like to direct the reader to several passages from the 683rd session for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality; in them Seth contends with variations on the counterpart theme as they’re developed in certain other probable realities:)

(1.) It is quite possible, for example, for several selves to occupy a body, and were this the norm it would be easily accepted. That implies another kind of multipersonhood, however, one actually allowing for the fulfillment of many abilities of various natures usually left unexpressed. It also implies a freedom and organization of consciousness that is unusual in your system of reality, and was not chosen there.

(In Chapter 19 of Personal Reality, I found this line of Seth’s in the 667th session for May 30, 1973:) For reason and emotion are natural counterparts.

(Ten sessions earlier, there’s a particularly evocative reference to counterparts in the 657th session for April 18, 1973, in Chapter 15 of Personal Reality. In retrospect that material seems to be a clear indication of the later development of the counterpart concept — and one passage could well refer to “Unknown” Reality long before that project was ever thought of as far as Jane and I were concerned. Seth:)

… those selves are different counterparts of yourself in creaturehood, experiencing bodily reality; but at the same time your organism itself shuts out the simultaneous nature of experience.

… the so-called laws of your camouflage physical universe do not apply to the inner universe … However, the laws of the inner universe apply to all camouflage universes … Some of these basic laws have counterparts known and accepted in various camouflage realities.

2. I’ve directed the reader to them before — but in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality see Jane’s information on neurological speeds in appendixes 4 and 5. As I wrote in Note 19 for Appendix 12: “My personal opinion is that although many may find it difficult reading, Appendix 4 contains some of the most important material in Volume 1.” Jane also referred to her ghostly “Saratoga experience” in that appendix: Both she and Seth dealt with it in sessions 685–86.

3. In the opening notes for the 718th session, I wrote that I’d just finished a series of diagrams for Jane’s Adventures. In Diagram 1 for Chapter 10, I tried to show schematically the same idea Seth mentions here, but with the terminology Jane used in her own book. She wrote about a series of Aspect selves orbiting a nonphysical source self, then continued: “Imagine a multidimensional Ferris wheel, each separated section being an Aspect self. As our ‘seat’ approaches the ground level, we’re the Aspect who intersects with the space-time continuum, and life starts. But this Ferris wheel moves in every possible direction, and its spokes are ever-moving waves of energy, connecting the Aspects with the center source. Each other position intersects with a different kind of reality in which it is, in turn, immersed.”

5. I thought of Seth’s material on pain and suffering, as presented in Appendix 12. See the excerpts from the 580th session for Seth Speaks, and the 634th session for Personal Reality.

6. Perhaps I should have briefly discussed it in Volume 1, but ever since Seth originally gave his “Joe, Jane, Jim, and Bob” material (as I call it) in the 683rd session, I’ve wondered about possible connections between the probabilities described in that session and our own reality: How much of our species’ distorted, intuitive knowledge of those probable realities may appear as myth and oddity in our camouflage universe? I’m thinking about androgyny, of course, which is the concept of both male and female in one, and/or of hermaphroditism, wherein a person or animal possesses the sexual organs of both the male and the female. Considering our personal lack of conscious knowledge about androgyny and such related concepts at the time, Jane and I think it most interesting that Seth came through with that particular material in the 683rd session.

A little investigation gave us glimpses into numerous instances in which blended masculine and feminine qualities are contained in the gods of our very ancient myths. The same principles of androgyny can be found in much of the literature of our own century. Whether scientific or not, myths may contain the deepest truths of all for our species, at least in conventional terms: Jane and I are intrigued to think that the sources for those verities could spring partly from other realities.

Much could be written here — volumes, easily. I’ll simply add that in religious terms alone Christ can be seen as androgynous, in that he’s obviously a symbol of the unification of opposites — whether of the conscious and the unconscious, the feminine and the masculine, this reality and others, the mystical and the “practical,” and so forth. And a number of old disciplines thought that before the creation of Eve from his body, Adam, the first, original man, was really male and female.