“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we waited for the session to begin Jane abruptly received a block of impressions from Seth. They concerned the opposing uses of personal power by two individuals whom we’d encountered within the last week: the woman lawyer who had interrupted the session last Wednesday evening, and who is so afraid of her power; and the young classical guitarist who had visited us last night, and who revels in the positive use of his power. The impressions are for use in either “Unknown” Reality, Jane said, or in Psychic Politics.⁵ She grinned: “Thanks, Seth.” Then she launched into the session before I could finish these notes. I came back to them at first break.)

The Sumari abilities are highly creative ones, however. To a large extent they have been inhibited in your society. I have been speaking of them here so that each individual can learn to recognize his or her own degree of Sumariness. The playful, creative elements of personality can then be released. These qualities are particularly important as they add to, temper, or enhance the primary characteristics of the other families of consciousness.

(Pause.) If you are a “reformer,” a “reformer by nature,” then the Sumari characteristics, brought to the surface, could help you temper your seriousness with play and humor, and actually assist you in achieving your reforms far easier than otherwise. Each personality carries traces of other characteristics besides those of the family of consciousness to which he or she might belong. The creative aspects of the Sumari can be particularly useful if those aspects are encouraged in any personality, simply because their inventive nature throws light on all elements of experience.

To some degree you feel the same way when you encounter the concept of probable selves, or of counterparts. It is as though you had an unlimited bank of abilities and characteristics from which to draw, and yet were afraid of doing so — fearing that any addition could make you less instead of more. If all of this goes on personally, as you choose one melody and call it yourself, then perhaps you can begin to see the mass creative aspects in terms of civilizations that seem to rise and fall.

From the outside, for instance, it might seem as if a young person dies because in one way or another he or she is dissatisfied with life itself. Certainly it is usually taken for granted that suicides are afraid of life. However, suicides and would-be suicides often have such a great literal lust for life that they constantly put it into jeopardy, so that they can experience what it is in heightened form. The same applies to many who follow dangerous professions. It is fashionable to suppose that these people have a death wish. Instead, many of them have an intensified life wish, so to speak. Certainly it seems destructive to others. To those people, however, the additional excitement is worth the risk. The risk, in fact, gives them an intensified version of life.⁹

This is obviously not the case with all suicides¹⁰ or would-be suicides, or all risk-takers. But those elements are there. A person who dies at 17 may have experienced much greater dimensions of living, in your terms, than someone who lives to be 82. Such people are not as unaware of those choices as it seems.

He picks, or she picks, victims as intuitively as the victim seeks out the slayer. On the other hand, Mary’s experiences in life may make her change her mind, so to speak, so that at 17 she encounters a severe illness instead, from which she victoriously recovers. Or she might narrowly miss being murdered when a bullet from the killer’s gun hits the person next to her. On an entirely different level and in a different way, she might have no such experiences but be a writer of murder mysteries, or a nurse in surgery. The particular variations that one person might play are endless. You cannot consciously begin to alter the framework of your life, however, unless you realize first of all that you form it. The melody is your own. It is not inevitable, nor is it the only tune that you can play.

I have said before that personally you can change your past from the present.¹¹ The same applies to civilizations.

For those who may be puzzled by Seth’s reference to “pendulums,” I’ll quote a paragraph of my own for the 619th session at 10:01, in Chapter 4 of Personal Reality:

6. For some of Seth’s material in Personal Reality on true aggression, see Session 634 for Chapter 8, and Session 642 for Chapter 11.

9. Much of Seth’s material in Chapter 18 of Personal Reality applies here; see especially Session 665. Then see (in the same book) Session 667 for Chapter 19.

10. For some Seth material on suicide, see the first delivery for the 546th session, in Chapter 11 of Seth Speaks. In the 642nd session for Chapter 11 of Personal Reality, Seth mentioned that suicide can be “the result of passivity and distorted aggression, and of natural pathways of communication not used or understood.”

11. See the 657th session for Chapter 15 of Personal Reality; Seth talked about how to “repattern your past from the present.”