“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Jamaica” took place on a Saturday, and Seth referred to it briefly in the next session, on Monday night. That session turned out to be private, rather than one for book dictation. Seth came back to Jamaica in Jane’s ESP class the next evening [on November 19]; at the same time he began discussing his concept of “counterparts,” which he formally introduces in tonight’s [721st] session for “Unknown” Reality. His material enhances my Roman and Jamaican visions [and others] — which saves me considerable effort in figuring them out for myself, of course. And, obviously, Seth does a much better job of putting them all together than I could.

(Yesterday’s “Jane” session seemed to run itself, to take place outside of time as we usually think of that quality. It lasted from 2:00 P.M. until after 12:30 A.M., with interruptions only for a casual supper of scrambled eggs, and an occasional short break. We estimate, then, that in a slightly altered state of consciousness Jane gave impressions for something like nine hours out of the actual ten and a half involved.

If, for example, you believe that you are possessed of great inner wealth, you may have a dream about a king in a fine palace. The king actually need not look like you at all, nor need you identify with him in the dream. Symbolically, however, this would represent one way of expressing your feelings. Inner wealth would be interpreted here in the same terms as worldly luxury. The dream, once created, would go its own way. If you have conflicts over the ideas connected with good and evil, or wealth and poverty, then the king might lose his lands or goods, or some catastrophe might befall him.

The reflections of your ideas and intimate emotions are then projected outward in a rich drama. You can observe the play, take a role in it, or move in and out of its acts as you prefer. You will use your own private symbols. These represent your psychic shorthand. They are connected with your personal creativity, so dream books will not help you in deciphering those meanings if they attach a specific significance to any given symbol. Symbols themselves change. If you had before you your entire dream history and could read — as in a book — the story of all of your dreams from birth, you would discover that you changed the meaning of your symbols as you went along, or as it suited your purposes. The content of a dream itself has much to do with the way you employ any given symbol.

(Long pause.) The properties of inner space, therefore, are endless. Most people are not this proficient in dream manipulation, but surely some of my readers will be able to remember what I am saying, while they are dreaming. To those people I say: “Look around you in the dream state. Try to expand any location in which you find yourself. If you are in a house, remember to look out the window. And once you walk to that window, a scene will appear. You can walk out of that dream house into another environment; and theoretically at least you can explore that world, and the space within it will expand. There will be no spot in the dream where the environment will cease.”

Now: What you think of as exterior space expands in precisely the same manner. In this respect, dream reality faithfully mirrors what you refer to as the nature of the exterior world.

Earth experience, even in your terms, is far more varied than you ever consciously imagine. The intimate life of a person in one country, with its culture, is far different from that of an individual who comes from another kind of culture, with its own ideas of art, history, politics or religion or law. Because you focus upon similarities of necessity, then the physical world possesses its coherence.⁵

Give us a moment … Your dream experience represents a pivotal reality, like the center of a wheel. Your physical world is one spoke. You are united with all of your other simultaneous existences through the nature of the dream state. The unknown reality is there presented to your view, and there is no biological, mental, or psychic reason why you cannot learn to use and understand your own dreaming reality.

In your dreams, in your terms, you find your personal past appearing in the present, so in those terms the past of the species also occurs. (Long pause.) Future probabilities are worked out there also so that individually and en masse the species decides upon its probable future. There is a feeling, held by many, that a study of dream reality will lead you further away from the world you know. Instead, it would connect you with that world in most practical terms.

The fact is that the basic nature of reality shows itself in the nature of the dream state quite clearly, where in any given night you may find yourself undertaking many roles simultaneously. You may change sex, social position, national or religious alliance, age, and yet know yourself as yourself.

(11:11.) Give us a moment … Quite literally, you live more than one life at a time. You do not experience your century simply from one separate vantage point, and the individuals alive in any given century have far deeper connections than you realize. (Intently:) You do not experience your space-time world, then, from one but from many viewpoints.

(Pause at 11:13.) If you are glutted — sated — with a steak dinner, for example, in America or Europe, then you are also famished in another portion of the world, experiencing life from an entirely different viewpoint. You speak of races of men. You do not understand how consciousness is distributed in that regard. You have counterparts¹⁰ of yourself.

Each identity has free will, and chooses its environment as a physical stance in space and time. Those involved in a given century are working on particular problems and challenges. Various races do not simply “happen,” and diverse cultures do not just appear. The greater self “divides” itself, materializing in flesh as several individuals, with entirely different backgrounds — yet with each embarked upon the same kind of creative challenge.

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

The Roman soldier dreams of the black woman, and of Joseph. There is a reminiscence that appears even in the knowledge of the cells, and a certain correspondence.¹⁴ There are connections then as far as cellular recollection is concerned, and dreams. Now the Roman soldier and Nebene and the woman went their separate ways after death, colon: They contributed to the world as it existed, in those terms, and then followed their own lines of development, elsewhere, in other realities. So each of you exists in many times and places, and versions of yourselves exist in the world and time that you recognize. As you are part of a physical species, so you are a part of a species of consciousness. That species forms the races of mankind that you recognize.

(“Well,” I said after discussing the session with her, “it’s my understanding that our whole self or entity experiences a group of simultaneous physical lives in various historical periods, and that in ordinary terms we think of those lives as following one after another. That includes so-called future lives, too. But each of those incarnations will have its cluster of counterpart lives, revolving around it like planets around a sun. Within that context, of course, each counterpart personality thinks of itself as being the sun, or the center of things….”¹⁶ Yawning, Jane agreed.

(Jane’s own counterpart material included variations of Seth’s basic concept. Here’s one of her examples as she described it to me: “We can span a period like a century if we want to. We can be a child at one end of it and an old man or woman at the other … Michelangelo [who lived for 89 years, from 1475 to 1564] decided to span a century himself instead of as three counterparts, say. Since there aren’t any laws about all of this, a great man could choose to do it that way in order to affect our world more with his gifts, from his own personal angles. He wouldn’t necessarily want or need the counterparts, at least for those purposes. He’d have more than enough to offer on his own.”

And added later: Jane presented my account of the Maumee episode, as well as portions of the 721st session itself, in Chapter 12 of Politics.

10. This note is as much for my own edification as it is for anyone else’s. The definitions are from Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, © 1970 by The World Publishing Company, New York and Cleveland:

“Your curiosity did not concern philosophies, but had to do with the physical world, and particularly with its water passageways….”