“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Tonight Jane was so relaxed¹ that I didn’t expect her to hold a session. But at 8:45 she wanted to try — especially since we hadn’t done anything on Monday. “It might be a short one, though,” she said. “Maybe Seth will talk about our own things instead of giving dictation — your material on your father [which I received this past Sunday evening], or what you got on your mother this afternoon. Or maybe he’ll talk about what I got on your mother the other day, or my strands-of-consciousness stuff for Psychic Politics.”

(Jane’s material on strands of consciousness² had actually developed because of my experience involving my father while I was in an altered state of consciousness. That episode had upset me to some degree, but Jane’s discussion of the subject in Politics, plus a few comments Seth made in ESP class last night, helped me put the affair in a more objective light.

His experience appeared to imply that his father’s identity had so much mobility, and so many possibilities for development, that the very idea of identity seemed to lose its boundaries.⁴

(10:37. Jane’s trance had been excellent, her delivery fast for much of the time. “And here I didn’t even know if I could have a session,” she said. “I got most of the mountain thing in images while I was giving it. I think it’s a great concept and analogy. The whole thing comes from your father experience — the Miriam thing.

(“Right now I think I’m getting that everything on the face of the earth is related — that your consciousness is in an ant, or a rock⁸ or a tree, but that we’re not used to thinking that way. Not that one is superior to another — just that we’re all connected — that there’s some kind of weird familiarity, biologically and psychically, that we’ve never gotten consciously … What I’m getting is that your father could do any of the things that you wrote about [in Note 4], without invading anything or anyone. It’s just that our ideas of personhood and soul make it sound terrible, until you get used to those ideas….

(11:35.) Give us a moment … Not dictation: All of this should help you understand your own experience involving your father — and the later one with your mother; and, separately, Ruburt’s with your mother, for [Stella Butts] was sending out strands of consciousness in the directions that interest her.

4. In this (725th) session Seth mentions two of my recent inner experiences and one of Jane’s. Each one had to do with strands of consciousness, although in this note I’ll stress only the very unsettling one I had with my “dead” father last Sunday night, December 11.

The event could have been triggered by my internal perception of just a month ago, the day the 719th session was held. In Note 4 for that session I described how I’d seen myself as a very old man, and made a quick sketch of that vision; I added that the episode had in turn reminded me of observing my father as he lay dying in February 1971, at the age of 81. In the 719th session itself, Seth remarked that the interior view of myself represented “a ‘precognitive’ moment” in my present life that (obviously!) I have yet to encounter.

Now last Sunday evening, as I studied that “old” drawing of myself, I thought once more of my father in his last days — then a whole block of information came to me regarding his present nonphysical circumstances and “plans.” I wrote it all down immediately. I called it the “Miriam experience,” and Jane presents it in Chapter 12 of Politics.

The material I picked up about my father’s psychic intents was at first very bewildering. Hinted at was such a diffusion of consciousness that at the time individuality seemed to have little meaning. For I glimpsed Robert Butts, Sr. as he decided to disperse “himself” into a series of other personalities in both the past and the near future, so that I wondered how — in that mélange of identities — my father could possibly know himself. Seth’s explanations in ESP class last night and in this evening’s session helped clear my mind considerably, though: According to him, consciousness has no difficulty in making such alliances while maintaining continuity of identity, though its vast abilities are certainly almost impossible for us to grasp.

In class yesterday evening, Seth first came through with some very earthy material that’s presented as Appendix 24. Then Jane read her notes on strands of consciousness, which — I can add later — also found their way into Chapter 12 of Politics. Seth soon returned in class with the following comments; he referred to Jane’s ideas mainly, yet as he talked I began to understand my experience with my father and his after-death situation as I perceived it.