“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.

“As I lay down for my usual nap this afternoon, I reminded myself that Jane was to hold her ESP class this evening. Jokingly, I thought, I’d probably ‘get something’ just when I’d have the least amount of time to write it up afterward, make any drawings I could, and just plain take a while to think about it. (On class night we eat supper by 6:00; students often begin to arrive by 7:15, although class doesn’t begin until 8:00.) So what happened? I experienced two long-lasting mental images before I slept. Was I happy with them? I didn’t know, for they not only rearoused old questions, but brought up some new ones.

“There was something very contradictory about the affair: The soldier-self I saw atop the tower was a Roman — whereas, according to the little I know of those times, such a position should have been occupied by a native Jew, who was perhaps a lookout for the city behind him. I saw, dimly, the outline of the typical Roman helmet, what seemed to be a leather vestment or short-sleeved garment, the upper portion of the shaft of a spear. I don’t think the ‘me’ I watched was an officer, as had been the case in my third Roman, of October 30.

“Now the scene changed, as one might change a slide in a projector. In another little drama, motionless like the first one, I saw my Roman soldier suspended in the act of falling from the tower. He had, in truth, been thrown off it, and I believe that he was either dead or mortally wounded from stab wounds. He had a bandage wrapped around the biceps of his left arm. Now I knew that a ‘task force’ of other Roman soldiers had carried out this assault, reaching ‘me’ by climbing the steps already described. I saw no sign of others on the tower, though. I kept this second image in mind for some time before allowing myself to realize that the victim fell amid a group of his fellows. One of them, I believe, ran a spear into the body.

“Several interesting — and frustrating — questions are raised by today’s episode. As stated, this makes the second time that I’ve had an experience involving the violent death of a Roman soldier in the earlier part of the first century A.D. (I never did arrive at names for those two militant individuals.) Perhaps both instances are merely my own psychological reflections of present concerns or challenges, although I think that more is involved. Given Seth’s concept of simultaneous time, the best connection I’ve made so far between the two soldiers is that as counterparts of mine they explore questions having to do with authority. As I rebel against authority now — a characteristic remarked upon by Seth in the 721st session — so do my Roman selves in their times.

“My own defiance is a peaceful one having to do with ideas. I see my two Romans physically undergoing an exploration of the opposite sides of rebellion or subversion, within the context of a much closer, more oppressive military authority: For whatever reasons, the Roman officer is turned upon and thrown into the Mediterranean to drown (as described in Note 1 for the 715th session)⁷; my Roman soldier, a man of lesser rank, has evidently betrayed his sworn position of trust, and is caught in authority’s vice. I think all of this could be counterpart action, all right, personified by two selves living in the same narrow time period, in close proximity in the same geographical area of the Middle East.⁸

“Seth’s data and my own on counterparts make sense to me. I feel (as Seth mentioned in the 721st session) that I wasn’t Nebene, or two different Roman soldiers per se, but rather that my whole self chose to manifest such personalities together; that I, too, am such a manifestation at a “later” time, then, and that from my own vantage point I can tune in to those other lives. But I question, at least provisionally, any idea of past or counterpart lives that I lived one hundred percent. At this writing, I think that I am living my only one hundred percent life now, with the privilege of occasionally being able to focus upon scattered portions of those other existences emanating from my whole self, which has its basic reality outside of our space-time concepts.¹⁰

“Assuming that my internal data about those three lives are reasonably correct, it may be, as Jane said recently, that the psyche is so incredibly rich that anything is possible. Is that true? (Humorously:) I’ll have a hell of a time with my list of chronological lives (which I have yet to work on, by the way) if I start turning up a whole group of them in one historical period. What if I happen to list half of the Roman army? I need to know more — lots more.”

You have heard terms like “The Brotherhood of Man,” or, as Ruburt might say, “The Brother-Womanhood of Women” (humorously). But at any given time, in your terms — at any given time — the population of the earth is made up of counterparts … and so when you kill an enemy, you are killing a version of yourself … For as you are members of a physical species, you are also members of a psychic kind of counterpart reality; and this membership straddles races or countries, or states or politics.

You form your history. You form your reality, and so no one is thrust into a position which first was not accepted as a challenge. So you work out your problems and challenges in whatever way you choose, historically. In your terms, again, you and the Roman are connected; and the Arab and the American; and the African and the Chinese; and so are your identities intermixed with others who may seem to be strangers, but others who speak with your own voice — others who communicate with you in their dreams as you communicate with them. You have comrades, and you come to this earth at a given time and place of your choice, and so do you reap and form the great challenges of your age.

(In view of these two separate instances, involving Peter and Mary, I wonder: Aside from whatever intrinsic validity they may have, does each of us telepathically pick up on the experiences of others and weave such information into personal psychological dramas? If so, do we do this frequently, so that our private fantasies have an inner coherence with those of our fellow human beings — and connections with them — that quite escapes our usual notice?

2. As he or she has probably done while going over some of the other notes for “Unknown” Reality, the reader might wonder why we don’t just ask Seth to comment upon a point of interest as soon as it happens. Not as convenient as it sounds, however: The next scheduled session may lie several days ahead; book dictation always comes first when Seth does speak, and at session’s end it may be too late for “extra” questions, or we may be tired; even though any given event is interesting, it can easily be pushed out of immediate awareness by succeeding ones that are equally intriguing. Before we know it, often, our best chance to ask about a certain happening has passed. We may not return to it for some time; even years can pass in the interim.

3. Yes, I learned from several reference works containing photographs, drawings, and maps, Jerusalem before A.D. 50 had been walled in. Not once but several times, and in various peripheries enclosing various portions of that ancient site: the old city, the new city, the upper and lower cities, and so forth. Aerial photos show that now, at least, there’s more than one southeastern corner of the city formed as the battlemented, meandering southern wall turns north in a series of steps or right angles. I could see no recent indications of towers there. However, the situation way back then would have depended on what walls existed (as well as upon my own psychic “vantage point”). There could have been other southeastern corners, with or without towers: Not all of the authors I consulted agreed upon the location of certain of Jerusalem’s fortifications (in the first century or any other), or when they had been built or destroyed.

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.

For another thing, what was my nameless Roman self doing on that tower? I didn’t “see” the reasons and actions leading to his presence there, and I doubt if I ever will. In my reference works I read accounts describing how Pontius Pilate, the Procurator (or governor) of Judea from approximately A.D. 26 to A.D. 36, had organized hunts for members of the Zealots, the Jewish political-religious sect that had consistently rebelled against the rule of the Roman Empire. This is the correct general time period for my visions, I think, and I felt a surge of thrilling sensations as I learned about certain subversive Zealot activities. Then I “picked up” that my soldier-self was killed by his countrymen because he’d traitorously sought to warn Zealot leaders of a planned search of the lower city of Jerusalem by Roman troops. My thrills deepened considerably — and those feelings of rightness were what I settled for; I could carry my wonderings no further, nor did I want to.

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.

For those who may wonder: I’ll close here by noting that historically the time period within which my impressions took place would embrace the reputed visits of Jesus Christ to Jerusalem during Pilate’s tenure, including Christ’s crucifixion around A.D. 30 — but that my experience per se had nothing to do with the Messiah.

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.

To me, this fact alone lends a credence to his visions that bolsters my own in the most meaningful way: I think our tower experiences of so long ago (in terms of linear time), plus our mutual artistic backgrounds now, with their corresponding social implications, are too closely allied to be explained as “coincidence” in the objective fact world. Peter’s surprising material, then, helps me tentatively recognize the physical connections those motionless visions of mine may have in our space and time.