“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.

(The material on counterparts emerged from Seth’s treatment of reincarnation. Along with his addition of simultaneous time, I’d say that the concept of counterparts provides reincarnation with a novel approach indeed; and that our awareness of both has always been latent within the reincarnational framework, whether in simultaneous or linear terms.

(Jane was tired by the session’s end. Without thinking, I casually remarked that currently I had three things going reincarnationally¹ — involving the Roman soldier, the black woman, and Nebene — and that if I could untangle their time sequences, I could use them as part of a chronological list of my “past” lives.

(“I wish you hadn’t said that, Rob,” Jane answered, somewhat ruefully. “Now I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff on reincarnation and time. So let’s get it down.”

(“All right,” she said finally. “I’ll just tell you this: The whole idea of reincarnation is all screwed up. To unscramble it would really be confusing. What I’m getting is that the idea of just one life in any given time is bullshit — the psyche is so rich that it can have more than one life in one time period, like your Nebene and Roman soldier living together in the first century. But if you tell people that, you’ll just get them all mixed up.”

(“Okay. I really want to know all about it. But at some other time.” (After that, we gave up and went to bed. In ESP class the following night, Seth indicated that he was ready to expand his concepts of personality still further — though, again, he didn’t mention counterparts per se. He started by commenting on my experience with Maumee once more. Then he continued.)

Now: a footnote to our [private] session of last night. Ruburt was correct: Lives are simultaneous. You can live more than one life at a time — in your terms now — but that is a loaded sentence. You are neurologically tuned in to one particular field of actuality that you recognize.² In your terms and from your viewpoint only, messages from other existences live within you as ghost images within the cells, for the cells recognize more than you do on a conscious level. That is, for a brief time, Joseph (Rob) was consciously able to perceive a portion of another existence.

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.

(Here I asked Seth if the strong thrilling sensations I’d repeatedly felt at the time had anything to do with my perceptions of the “ghost images” of Maumee and her surroundings. Seth answered:)

Each of you takes part in your world — and in your time as you understand it, and in your terms, all the creatures of the earth participate in the century. You work out creative challenges and possibilities. You are born into different races, into different cultures, with different — but the same — desires … There are many things that you are learning. And so, if you will forgive me, my dear Florence, I will use you as an example.

Now our Florence is working with her own ideas of good and evil, searching for what she thinks of as an aesthetic and moral code that she can rely upon. Her counterpart had that code, but found that he could not count upon it. Each is working on the same series of challenges. There are also two other counterparts. Between the four of them, the century is being covered. (To Florence, smiling:) I will tell you about that at another time. It is not my suspense story — it is your own!⁴

(“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.

what times unmanifest

… 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.

(And what about the very first counterpart references in our sessions? In Chapter 1 of The Seth Material Jane described how we began these sessions [on December 2, 1963] through our use of the Ouija board. During the first three sessions the material came from a Frank Withers — who, it developed in the 4th session, was one of the “personality fragments” making up the Seth entity, or whole self. Just before Seth announced his presence to us in that same session, Frank Withers spelled out a remark through the board that meant little to Jane and me at the time: “One whole entity may need several manifestations, even at simultaneous so-called times.”

(Seth himself first used “counterpart” in the 6th session for December 11, 1963. At the time — and for a long while afterward — his employment of the word meant little, if anything, to Jane and me. The newly begun sessions already contained a number of unfamiliar terms and ideas: In the 4th session three days earlier, for instance, Seth had just given us our entity names [Ruburt for Jane, Joseph for me], and touched upon the psychic links connecting the three of us. Any subtleties afforded by concepts like counterparts would have quite escaped us. For that matter, at the time we didn’t know whether or not the sessions would continue. Nor were we particularly concerned about the issue.

(In the 6th session, however, I made quite an intuitive remark: I told Jane I had the notion that Ruburt had once been Joseph. It took me a while to recognize that this had simply been my way of groping toward the realization that Seth, Jane, and I did have a strong psychic relationship. Though we’d started these sessions with the Ouija board, Jane had made such a rapid progression that she was already giving some material vocally. However, at the time we still used the board to obtain answers to most of our questions. After I made my statement about Ruburt and Joseph, Seth spelled out his reply through the board’s pointer as it moved quickly beneath our fingertips:)

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.”

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.