“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

People have written here asking about soul mates.³ In certain circles this is the latest vogue. The idea is an old one; it is based upon the reality of counterparts, and presents another version of the theory. But, again, it is treated with an almost pompous seriousness. (Pause.) Many of those who use the term do it to hide rather than to release their own joyful abilities. They spend time searching for their soul mates — but the search involves them in a pilgrimage for a kind of impossible communication with another, in which all division is lost, with the two then trying to join in a cementing oneness, suffocating all sense of play or creativity. You are not one part, or one half, of another soul,⁴ searching through the annals of time for your partner, undone until you are completed by your soul mate.

3. Our dictionary defines a soul mate as one of the opposite sex with whom an individual “has a deeply personal relationship” — a mundane enough description. Jane and I had thought the term, along with its implications, rather out of style until the publication of The Seth Material in 1970. Then we began to get letters from readers who either asked for Seth’s help in finding soul mates, or for his verification that such counterparts had, indeed, already been located.

4. See Seth’s very acute discussions of the soul (or entity) in sessions 526–28 for Chapter 6 of Seth Speaks. He came through with many excellent points. I’ve always been intrigued by the remark he made just before 10:43 in the 526th session: “You are one manifestation of your own soul.” Then in Chapter 9 of Personal Reality, see the 637th session at 10:20: “A group of cells forms an organ. A group of selves forms a soul. I am not telling you that you do not have a soul to call your own. You are a part of your soul. It belongs to you, and you to it.”

That material bothered Jane, as I wrote at the end of the session, since “she wasn’t taken with the idea of a group soul, say, or of sharing a soul.” For Seth’s resolution of this little dilemma, see Session 638 in the same chapter.

To me, beside whatever relationship it might have with counterpart reality, the soul-mate belief embodies strongly distorted versions of the ideas contained in the two Seth passages quoted above.