“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.

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.

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.

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.