“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.”

(There’s been a definite acceleration in Jane’s and my own psychic adventures lately. In fact, we’ve had trouble keeping up with our experiences, and little time to study them. I am sure of one thing: I’m in contact with my deceased parents in ways that I certainly didn’t employ while they were physical creatures. Nor did they in relation to me, of course. Yet certainly the use of such inner abilities — or at least an awareness of them — could greatly enhance communication between the members of a “living” family.)

(Pause.) In the same way, quite separate identities can merge with others in a give-and-take gestalt, in which the overall intent is as clear as the shape of the table. To some extent Joseph was perceiving that kind of inner psychic organization.

In your terms the earth at any given time represents the most exquisite physical, spiritual, and psychic cooperation, in which all consciousnesses are related and contribute to the overall reality. Physically, this is somewhat understood.

Give us a moment … (Then slowly:) It is difficult to explain on spiritual and psychic levels without speaking in terms of gradations of identity, for example, but in your terms even the smallest “particle” of identity is inviolate. It may grow, develop or expand, change alliances or organizations, and it does combine with others even as cells do. (Long pause.) Your body does not feel as if you invade it. Your consciousness and its consciousness are merged; yet it is composed of the multitudinous individual consciousnesses that form the tiniest physical particles within it. Those particles come and go, yet your body remains itself. What was physically a part of you last year is not today. Physically, you are a different person. Put simply, the stuff of the body is constantly returned to the earth,* where it forms again into physical actualization — but always differently.

(Long pause, eyes closed. Jane’s delivery had slowed considerably.) In somewhat the same way your identity changes constantly, even while you retain your sense of permanence. That sense of permanence rides upon endless changes — it is actually dependent upon those physical, spiritual, and psychic changes. In your terms, for example, if they did not occur constantly your body would die. The cells, again, are not simply minute, handy, unseen particles that happen to compose your organs. They also possess consciousnesses of their own. That [kind of] consciousness unites all physical matter.

(Long pause.) You speak about the chromosomes. Your scientists write about heredity, buried and coded in the genes,⁶ blueprints for an identity not yet formed. But there are psychic blueprints,⁷ so to speak, wherein each identity knows of its “history”; and taking any given line of development, projects that history. The potential of such an identity is far greater, however, than can ever be expressed through any physical one-line kind of development (forcefully).

(“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….

Through such strands of consciousness all of your world is related. Your own identity sends out strands of itself constantly, then. These mix psychically with other strands, as physically atoms and molecules are interchanged. So there are different organizations of identity in which you play a part.

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.

At 11:35 tonight Seth briefly referred to my second recent psychic experience, and to Jane’s. Both involved more “conventional” ideas, and both involved perception of my deceased mother in her own nonphysical state. (Jane’s happened on Monday afternoon, December 9, while mine took place this afternoon.) Jane’s was especially clear, featuring a communication from Stella Butts — who was seemingly quite “herself.” It isn’t necessary to study those two events in detail here, however.