“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane and I consider Seth’s concept of counterparts to be an intriguing psychological framework, spacious enough to serve as a workable thematic structure in which the social and nationalistic characteristics of our species can be studied, as well as the components of the individual psyche. That is, the private person is here seen as interacting with others because there is, beneath our awareness, an inner “person-to-person” relationship connecting each individual with his or her physical counterparts, though they may well be living in other parts of the globe while sharing the same historical period. It follows, then, that one may or may not ever meet a counterpart “in the flesh” — may or may not even suspect the existence of such relationships.

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.

(To Florence:) Far be it from me to disturb your ancient ideas of yin and yang, or Jung, or good and evil, or of right and wrong, or of good and bad vibrations! I was beginning a new body of material, and so we have not finished with it by a long shot! What I hope to say is that your world exists in different terms than those you recognize, and that reincarnation is indeed a myth and a story that stands for something else entirely.

(“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.

(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.

(2.) In some systems of physical existence, a multipersonhood is established, in which three or four “persons” emerge from the same inner self, each one utilizing to the best of its abilities those characteristics of its own. This presupposes a gestalt of awareness, however, in which each knows of the activities of the others, and participates; and you have a different version of mass consciousness. Do you see the correlation?

In the systems in which evolution of consciousness has worked in that fashion, all faculties of body and mind in one “lifetime” are beautifully utilized. Nor is there any ambiguity about identity. The individual would say, for example, “I am Joe, and Jane, and Jim, and Bob.”⁶ There are physical variations of a sexual nature, so that on all levels identity includes the male and female. Shadows of all such probabilities appear within your own system, as oddities. Anything apparent to whatever degree in your system is developed in another.

Quite literally, the “inner” self forms the body by magically transforming thoughts and emotions into physical counterparts …

… 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.

I could list a few other past lives I’m supposed to have known, and so could Jane. Some of those we’ve picked up on our own. Over the years Seth has also come through with a modest number of reincarnational experiences involving the three of us, as well as others concerning any two of us. Examples are given in Appendix 18. But Jane and I are more intrigued by passages in Appendix 18 like this one, from the 398th session for March 11, 1964: “Personalities are not static things. Entities are eternal. They are not as nicely nor as neatly packaged out, one to a body, as your psychologists believe.”

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.

All of which reminds me that to many viewers the “portraits” I paint are balanced equally between the masculine and feminine, regardless of whether the subject in any one of them is male or female. The paintings are of personalities I see mentally rather than physically; they do represent, I believe, my efforts to unify in any particular image my intuitive appreciation of the male/female qualities embodied within each of us.

That same 657th session contains Seth’s extremely useful statement: “The Present Is the Point of Power.” From it he proceeds to show how all that we are — whatever our individual belief systems may be — stems from the brilliant focus of our physical, mental, and spiritual abilities in “present” experience.