“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Dictation (slowly and softly). The unknown reality: It cannot be expressed in the cozy terms of known knowledge, and so you must stretch your own imagination, rouse yourself from mental lethargy, and be bold enough to discard old dogmatic comfort blankets.

Then, however, you begin to wonder about the other islands that you know exist beyond your vision. Are they like you? Your wondering forms a tiny window in the fog, and you look through. Astonished, you discover that a small coral path unites you with the next island that is glimpsed, shimmering now through the ever-growing window in the mist. Who is to say where you end and the other island begins?

Now this first island is very clever indeed, and so it sends its spirit wandering to the closest counterpart, and says: “You are myself, but without sand or palm trees.”

The spirit of the first island visits the second one, and finds itself amazed. It feels an ever-thrusting power, rushing up from beneath, that erupts in always-changing form. Yet it is always itself, comparing its experience to what it has known. When the volcano itself, ceaselessly erupting, wishes for peace, the spirit of the first island thinks of its own quiet home shores. The volcano learns a new lesson: It can direct its power in whatever way it chooses, shooting upward or lying quietly. It can indeed be dormant and dream for centuries. (Slowly now:) It can, if it chooses, allow soft sands to lie gracefully upon its cooling expanse.

(Heartily:) What a transformation! Its volcano, it finds, now gives birth to soil and pollen, its excitement roused in a million different ways. It meets the spirit of the first island that has been living there, and says: “What a change! I would like a still more spectacular display. The flowers are not nearly colorful or wild enough. It is, if you will forgive me, too well-tamed — yet all in all you’ve done wonders. Now, however, I’d like a cultural interchange with others still unknown; and if you don’t mind I wish you’d go home. (Whispering:) This is, after all, me, and my land.”

The spirit of Island One says: “I quite enjoyed my venture, and I’ve learned that the great explosive thrusts of creativity are good — but, oh, I yearn for my own quiet, undisturbed shores; and so if you don’t care I think I’ll return there.” And so it does — to find a land in some ways transformed. The sands still lie glittering, but the fog and mists are gone. The beloved birds have multiplied, and there is in the old familiar sameness a new, muted, but delightful refrain, colon: new species in keeping with the old, but more vigorous. The spirit of Island One realizes that it would find the old conditions quite boring now, and the new alterations fill it with pleasing excitement and challenge. What a delightful interchange. For the spirit is convinced that it definitely improved the condition of Island Two, and there is no doubt that the spirit of the second island improved Island One beyond degree.

And the spirit of the volcanic island says to the spirit of the first island: “My volcano knows, now, how best to use its energy. It can shoot into the heavens in great displays, or creep into the tiny crevices of earth, equally powerful.”

So in one century you were Nebene, and Ruburt was indeed the “prostitute” priestess,³ and so did you challenge each other, as in different ways you do now, with tendencies that appear to be opposites, but are instead different ways of approaching the same kind of challenge. If you could understand, it would help in many areas you do not as yet suspect.

Now in a way your mother and Ruburt were counterparts; for Ruburt lives in a trust of individual abilities toward which your mother yearned; and Ruburt gives a love to you which your mother yearned to give — yet while retaining her identity — to a man. Your mother understood love’s purpose and felt its presence in Ruburt. And at the same time she was actually annoyed when she felt that you were not following your [commercial] artistic ability through, despite her surface misunderstandings of it.⁶

She identified with you to some extent, and to some unrecognized degree was “only masculine, now,” in her understanding of power. I hope you will recognize what I mean: but in the light of her understanding at the time, children were to be used as power, as a man might use weapons.⁷

Stella Butts changed and grew. But in certain terms she was the masculine center of the family, emotions or not, the aggressive one; and speaking conventionally now, your father (Robert Sr.) accepted the more passive creative role. This has meaning in terms of your [unpublished] information⁸ involving the masculine and feminine aspects that united and separated your parents. Your father would have been more “comfortable” as a woman, and she as a male. Yet for their own purposes they each chose to experience the other side of the coin, so to speak.

Consciousness is not limited. Identities can mix and merge while retaining their inviolate nature and memories. This is all for now, but again, later, you will see where it relates, and how you can disperse your own characteristics into another and they can disperse theirs into you, with your consent and theirs, to form new aspects of reality and to cast new light on combined purposes and challenges.

7. And at various times through my early years, I understood how my mother used me (and my two brothers) as “weapons,” or tools or objects, against my father. “Weapons,” perhaps, is too strong a word, I think now, for I don’t remember my mother blatantly encouraging “her” children to defy their father. Yet we would often end up being on her side. As I grew up I came to feel that my father was both strongly surprised and disappointed by the wife and children he’d chosen to be involved with.