“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The physical self as you know it is a focus of consciousness that forms a personality in response to that focus. It is very difficult to make analogies here, but I am foolhardy enough to try it. (Pause.) It seems to you that any naturally aborted fetus has no physical life at all, that such life has been denied to it for some reason. Instead, the fetus experiences another level: physical life at a different scale, that in your terms would apply to the distant past.

(Intently at 9:36:) Now this does not mean that your personality as you know it was often trapped within a womb, destined to die there, or that a hypothetical whole self would not be born. It means that the archaeology of your psyche as it is physically focused carries those experiences. The self is not … (pause, eyes closed) … give us a moment; I am searching for a good analogy … the self is not like a clay figure coming from a potter’s oven, so that you can say: “Ah, here is a self, and nothing can be added to it.” You have always existed as a probable self, though you were not focused in the knowledge of your own experience.

Give us a moment. (Long pause.) The chart of events at the time of your “birth” is like one small snapshot of someone’s backyard in the afternoon. Here in this analogy, the entire earthly personality could be compared to the world. Now as long as you make your deductions according to that one picture, there will be correlations that apply — but only to that small specific area.

In your terms, the person at birth is affected by multidimensional conditions, and the collective position of the planets is but one very minute indication of the other realities involved. Ruburt is correct: Even in conventional terms a true horoscope would have to involve the time of death in your temporal reality, as well [as that of birth]. Your focus of attention forms boundaries that predispose you to believe in a point at which your consciousness emerges, as you understand it, and a point when it is no longer effective, or dies. Your beliefs in such concepts limit your perception, for by altering the focus of your attention you can to some extent become aware of perception before and after the recognized points of birth and death.

(Not only that: Jane now had several other channels of data available from Seth. “God, I get impatient!” she exclaimed “But in physical reality I can get only one of them at a time, and you can write just one sentence at a time.⁷ Oh, forget it, Seth,” she added, half laughing, for that “energy personality essence” was ready with comments on what she’d just told me. Jane got up and walked around the living room, where we were holding the session. When she went into the kitchen she picked up more from Seth on astrology.

On a more personal level, Jane herself naturally aborted a three-month-old fetus, less than a year after our marriage in 1954 (and nine years before she initiated these sessions). Seth has said very little about this event, nor have we asked him to. He did remark some time ago in a private session that the miscarriage spontaneously came about because the personality inhabiting the fetus “changed its mind,” and withdrew from the physical world. At some indefinite date we do plan to invite Seth to discuss the whole situation in detail.

7. Jane first experienced the multiple-channel effect with Seth not long after she began delivering Personal Reality; see Session 616 for Chapter 2.