“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Again, we come up against limited ideas of personhood. If I tell you that you are a part of a far greater personhood, then unfortunately you take this to mean that you are less than you are by contrast. I am not referring here to you specifically, Joseph, any more than I am to any reader or class member.

(10:22.) Give us a moment … The children that spring from your loins are real. They have their own lives. They share a certain portion of your experience, but they use that experience as they choose. In your terms, you exist in physical life before your children do. Now: In other terms, your own greater personhood exists before you do in the same way. That greater personhood gives birth to many “psychic children,” who then become physical by being born into the races of men and women.

Give us a moment … The world then is indeed like a theater at any given time, but the play is not preordained or laid out. It is instead a spontaneous happening in which overall themes are accepted beforehand. Each “greater personage” takes several parts, or brings forth several psychic children, who spring to life as individual human beings. These psychic children have as much say in their birth as you have in yours, physically speaking, and that is considerable.

You choose ahead of time your environment and purposes. This greater personage then has earthly counterparts, each individual alive taking part in the vital human drama of any given century. Each learns from the others, and the counterparts fit together like mosaics — except that these mosaics are fully endowed with independence and free will. So the individuals alive upon the body of the earth at any given time fit together as beautifully as the cells do within your individual body at a particular time (most emphatically).

Now remember: You are one earth version of your own greater personage. You are utterly yourself. That greater identity, however, is intrinsically your own, but is the part that cannot be physically expressed. Your experiences are your own. Through you they become a part of the experience of the greater identity, but its reality also “originally” gave you your physical existence, as you gave your children physical life. Your children are not you, yet once they were contained within the mother’s womb. Yet they did not originate from the womb either, but from the seed and the egg.

Give us a moment … Your individual experience then becomes a part of your own greater personage, but at the same time you unconsciously draw upon the knowledge of that personage and use it for your purposes: You become an offshoot, so to speak. You are unconsciously aware of the experiences of “your” counterparts, as they are of yours, and you use that information to round out your own. Period.

Give us a moment … Certain abilities can be developed with much greater ease in particular time periods — in a highly industrialized technology, for example — and those interested in that kind of an environment did not generally appear in the eras of the cavemen, simply because those alive at that time were working with different challenges. So this hypothetical greater identity also chooses to be born in different time periods, historically speaking; and the same pattern appears in which counterparts are born as individuals, each biologically and spiritually connected, but with great intertwinings and variations, as with a physical family tree.

(Pause.) You are always at the center of your life. Again, your being as you understand it is never annihilated, but continues to develop its own existence in other ways. A portion of you has lived many lives upon this planet, but the “you” that you know is freshly here, and will never again encounter space and time in precisely the same way. The same applies to each life lived either before or after. Biologically you rest upon a heritage, however, and psychically the same applies. The soul, or this greater personage, does not simply send out an old self in new clothes time and time again (humorously), but each time a new, freshly-minted self that then develops and goes its own way. (With much emphasis:) That self rides firmly, however, in the great flight of experience, and feels within itself all of those other fully unique versions that also fling their way into existence.

So you, Joseph, were Nebene, and the black woman, and the Roman soldier,³ and yet you were none of those. But their realities are also a part of your own greater alliance.