“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The day before the 724th session was held on December 4, I had another experience involving internal perceptions of myself as a Roman soldier in the first century A.D. As far as I can tell, however, this latest episode was not a continuation of my three visions of last October, in which I saw the end of my life while I was an officer in the armed forces of Imperial Rome¹ — yet this time also I confronted circumstances surrounding my own death. The little adventure certainly fits in with Seth’s idea of counterparts, as he introduced it in the 721st session, but it raises a number of questions, too. Jane discussed my previous “visits” to the first century in Chapter 4 of her Psychic Politics, but [I can add later] she never did deal with this one. I don’t mind noting that I wish she had.² She might have been able to offer insights about it that I couldn’t come up with, especially concerning the seemingly endless abilities of the psyche — call it personalized energy, consciousness, or what-have-you — to travel through its own space and time.

“A sound effect was involved here that was unique for me — doubly so, actually. First, until now my internal perceptions have staged themselves like old silent films; second, the sound itself was quite unusual: The clustered troops on the ground were emitting a low rhythmic chanting or wailing. This was no happy occasion. This sound, rising and falling in such mournful cadences, was unintelligible to me.

(Peter’s statement was soon confirmed by another longtime friend of ours, Sue Watkins,¹² who also knows Peter well. He’d related the entire affair to her some months ago; his original perceptions had taken place over seven years ago, long before Sue had introduced him to Jane and me in 1973. Peter told me after class that my sketches had instantly rearoused his memories, although in his experience he’d seen the event from different angles. Yet, even with those discrepancies, and a few others, Peter believed that the walls in Jerusalem, the battlemented tower, the soldiers that I’d just described and depicted, were all the same as those he’d seen in his own visions of so much earlier.

5. I experienced much stronger thrilling sensations two and a half weeks ago, during my perceptions of myself as Maumee, the black woman who lived in Jamaica in the early 1800’s. See the opening notes for the 721st session, with its Note 1. In Appendix 21, Seth remarked that those suffusing feelings are my personal sign that I’ve made a “neurological changeover.” When that happens I seem able to at least glimpse other time periods, other realities.

As best I can interpret the objective information at hand, the physical locale of my subjective experience is a precarious one, since outside the eastern and southern boundaries of Jerusalem the terrain quickly drops away into valleys close and steep enough to protect the city from large-scale attack — with hardly enough room there for the “hordes” of Roman soldiers I saw on the “flat ground.” I cannot explain my terminology or choice of locations, except to say that I expressed just what I wanted to. I trust the elements of those perceptions, and my reactions to them, but their conscious understanding and integration remain beyond my abilities at this time. Obviously (as will be explained), I think it wise to ascribe as much of the episode’s validity to its symbolic meanings as to its physical ones.

11. It’s of interest here to note that although he referred to my three Roman-officer perceptions of last October in the 721st session (which itself was held a month after I’d experienced them), Seth didn’t mention that I had a second Roman-soldier counterpart living in the same time and area of the world in the first century A.D. I didn’t ask about any such possibility, either. I don’t attach any special meaning to these observations, although we may ask Seth to comment upon them eventually (see Note 2). If his material on counterparts is correct, any of us could have many such relationships going in a given century — too many to conveniently uncover, perhaps, considering the physical time that would be necessary to do the psychic work.

This isn’t the first time Peter Smith has been able to comment upon one of my Roman experiences from his own viewpoint. He’s traveled a good deal. In Chapter 4 of Politics, Jane described how Peter offered some interesting present-day “correlations” with portions of my third Roman, of the first century A.D. Peter’s information concerned the Spanish fishermen he saw hauling large nets ashore along certain beaches of the Mediterranean Sea; I’d seen similar actions during my internal perceptions that day.