“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At the same time, in the same world and in the same century, Joseph was an aggressive, adventurous, relatively insensitive Roman officer, who would have little understanding of manuscripts or records — yet who also followed authority without question.¹²

In your terms, Joseph is now a man who questions authority, stamps upon it and throws it aside, who rips apart the very idea structures to which he “once” gave such service.

In greater terms, these experiences all occur at once. The black woman followed nothing but her own instincts (and very vividly, too). I do not want to give too much background here, and hence rob our Joseph of discoveries that he will certainly make on his own — but (louder) the woman bowed only to the authority of her own emotions, and those emotions automatically put her in conflict with the [British colonial] politics of the times.

1. The series of visions that made up my overall perception of the black woman in Jamaica were the most vivid I’ve experienced yet. For me they had a most unique, thrilling, immediate quality, and strong emotional involvement. As I sat at the typewriter in my studio, I was flooded with perceptions of myself as such a woman: Pursued by an armed English military officer, she ran for her life down a hilly village street. She wasn’t especially young. Her — my — name? Maumee, or Mawmee — an illiterate but shrewd, very strong personality who was acting in rebellion against the colonial authority of England in the early 1800’s. She escaped that time, and lived to struggle often against such forces on the island.

12. My Roman-soldier self might have “followed authority without question,” as Seth states in this (721st) session, yet he must have behaved with more than a little guile. In a private session held some time after he’d finished “Unknown” Reality, Seth again referred to the Roman — doing so because of additional material I’d produced about that first century personality. Seth:

“As a Roman, you pretended to be a follower while you were a man of rank in the military. You had no belief in the conventional gods, yet you were supposed to be conquering lands in their names. You traveled even to Africa. You had a disdain for leaders as liars, and of the masses as followers, and so you were always in one kind of dispute or another with your fellows, and even with the authorities. You were of a querulous nature, yet highly curious, and, again, physically involved.