“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Otis (my father’s father) was a woman, born in India two years after Otis’s death, and dying at a young age in her early teens. (Long pause.) He will have other reincarnations, and will eventually in your terms become a strong entity on his own. He will indeed greet your father. They had been brothers, and your father somewhat resented the change in relationship even while he chose it.

This was not a dream, but the first clear recognition on your father’s part that he was ready to leave the physical plane entirely. You also picked up this information, and it was the impetus for your dream. He had not fully made the decision earlier. The paper (which Jane, in her dream, saw my father throw down) represented the notes your father wrote to himself. The paper was empty. There was nothing else he would do here. He discarded the paper. Earlier he had held it even though it was empty.

(“Why did Jane and I find his photograph so striking?” Sunday at the family home in Sayre, I found a copy my father had made of a very old picture of Otis. It was in a cigar box on a back shelf, along with other odds and ends. Otis was elderly even then; my father was born in 1890. The physical resemblance between my father and grandfather is striking. Otis’s photograph exerted a most peculiar fascination for Jane and me. I would like to do a painting from it.)

[...] As I am sure you know, your father is not unhappy. You never knew your father. The man who was to have been your father left. [...]

[...] In a sense he was more your passive mother than your father. [...] The man you call your father is happier now than he has ever been.

(Long pause.) Your father and two brothers were originally part of the same entity. [...] (Pause.) The main energy of the man you call your father left long ago, as I told you. [...]

[...] This carried over into the writing, and comes to the forefront now because of his father’s condition. He wanted to express love for his father as a child far more openly than he felt his father would allow. He felt that his father would consider such demonstrations not masculine.

(11:30.) The condition becomes more worrisome because it now bears the brunt of an unspoken or unexpressed love that is hidden behind his conscious attitude and behavior toward his father. Frank’s father himself was afraid of showing unseeming love, in his terms, toward his family. Frank avoided that kind of behavior with his children, but did not fully surmount the pattern as far as his own father was concerned.

When he learned to write, he thought of writing to express such thoughts, and was always tempted to use writing as an expression of those subjective feelings he felt were forbidden—not just directed toward his father, but feelings of which he felt his father would disapprove. [...]

[...] He does not owe the father any more than a normal filial devotion. He does not owe the father any more than that, and to seek the father’s pleasure superficially, or to try to please the father in fields where he has no interest, will not lead either to personal development or success, and will not help the father in any way.

[...] The love that does exist between father and son can best be maintained and nurtured when the son stands alone, and lets the father know that he has the strength to do so. For the sacrifices unconsciously asked by the father, the father regrets, and the sacrifices made by the son, the son regrets.

—subconsciously, and subconsciously the father knows. And why else would he demand from a son that which no father has a right to demand? He, the father, subconsciously knew and remembered this betrayal, and he would see to it that the present personality paid, and paid in full.

[...] In his subconscious your father and mother become two aspects both representing his own mother. The father, nearly crippled, to be cared for, and therefore frightening. Yet he spontaneously kissed the father, and tried to give him strength.

The father, your father, represents to him, Ruburt, the helpless portions of his own mother, directed so to speak where he can see them. Your mother represents to him the destructive, unreasoning energies of his own mother, and in the pull and conflict between your mother and father, he sees the tortured connections of his mother’s soul.

[...] She demanded that some portion of your father remain. [...] More than half of your father’s personality has been vacant, and this portion has been with the entity. [...]

[...] My mother and father were arguing loudly. Father threatened to leave my mother and my brother and me. My father also had hay fever. [...] [I have always had it since I can consciously remember.] When I remarked that my father had got rid of his hay fever, Seth said he gave it to me. [...] I identified with my father out of fear, Seth went on, because he threatened to leave me and thus must be all powerful; and since my father had hay fever, I acquired hay fever as a mistaken sign of strength.

[...] It involved Bill’s father William [Jane hadn’t known the name of Bill’s father], and an older man with brown hair whom Bill looked upon as being in a position of authority. There was some kind of disagreement as to Bill’s choice of a career [Bill had left the Navy not long before], an argument with Bill’s father; ever after that Bill didn’t get along with his father. Bill did not follow his father’s suggestions, I believe.

(Seth told Bill he subconsciously blamed his father for his mother’s condition, after Bill remarked that whenever he and his father were together for a few minutes they would end up arguing. [...] Bill took it to mean his father had hurt his mother. Later when his mother fell ill, Bill made the subconscious connection with her illness and this earlier incident, and blamed his father for his mother’s illness.

He wanted to be the father of boys. [...] He wanted to be the father of three for his own reasons, rather than the father of one or two children, you see.

[...] It had been agreed between the mother and the father beforehand. The whole personality of the father did not need to be involved after a certain point however, and withdrew. [...]

[...] Psychologically speaking, and in these terms only, on certain levels the son desires to replace the father. When the father is vigorous the son is fearful of retaliation. [...]

(It will be noted that in the 12th session, January 2,1964, Seth, without being asked by us, stated that he “knows” Jane’s old friend, Father Trainor. Father Trainor was an Irish Catholic priest who visited Jane and her ill mother regularly, for years, during Jane’s grade and high school days. [...]

[...] I’m writing a prose sketch of Father Trainor. I thought that if I tried reading G. K. Chesterton’s Lepanto, and Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard the way Father Trainor used to, my memory would be refreshed. [...]

(As a check I suggested later that Jane try reading a different poem, one not read by Father Trainor, to see if she could summon this powerful new voice at will. [...] She said Father Trainor always read the Lepanto and the Elegy on his Sunday visits, and that she could not remember his reading anything else.

As a child he once thought that his father was immortal, in human terms — that he could do no wrong. The son tries to vindicate the father by doing no wrong himself, and perhaps by succeeding where it seems the father might have failed. It is much more natural for the male to try to vindicate the father than it is to destroy him, or envy him in negative terms.

The boy does not seek, naturally, to “dethrone” the father. He seeks to emulate him; he seeks to be himself as fully as it seems to him that his father was himself. He hopes to go beyond himself and his own capabilities for himself and for his father.

Many men, labeled homosexual by themselves and others, want to be fathers. [...] For example, in many cases the gentle “homosexual” father has a better innate idea of manliness than a heterosexual male who believes that men must be cruel, insensitive, and competitive. [...]

[...] Jane knew my father had belonged to the Lions Club. She did not know Dr. Martin was also a member, or that my father had been secretary of the club, and consequently handled money in the form of dues. I remember the big book my father used to keep the record of the club members’ dues, etc. In fact, my father and Dr. Martin were charter members of the Sayre Lions Club, initiated many years ago.

You picked up thoughts from your mother, directed against your father, and your father’s telepathic reply. [...] Your father was in the living room and your mother in the bedroom. [...]

[...] My father, Jane said, had to go to a meeting of an organization like the Lions Club. [...] There was a name, Gale, not that of a woman, connected with father .

[...] If you were your father’s son, you were somewhere your father’s daughter, and it was at that point of reference that you encountered the dream situation. [...]

(Pause.) Your father’s sentence—the paper-bag reference—was one he actually made in his own mind, in the life that you actually knew him in, and he considered that sons rather than daughters represented his one physical triumph —that is, he believed sons preferable, and they alone compensated for a working man’s life—a life he felt did not befit him. [...]

[...] If your father did have daughters, rather than sons in the life that you know, he actually would have fared better in the physical world, because he would have felt it his duty to protect them financially: he would have considered them fairly helpless, and in need of his abilities. [...]

The Christian-Science background with the father was also important, for it was this inner belief of the father that did sustain him, and that inclination of the father and his mother (Mattie) that Ruburt chose in his background to temper his own mother’s beliefs and lead him in our direction. [...]

Ruburt’s father, to Ruburt, meant laxness, relaxation to the extreme, without drive or fire, responsibility or control. [...] But that power went nowhere, for Ruburt’s father was physically free while his mother was not. [...]

Ruburt’s father represented the other extreme, with no firm purpose, seemingly driven willy-nilly, and accomplishing nothing. Both parents could be highly destructive, however—Ruburt’s father when he was drunk, and Ruburt’s mother generally.

([Pat:]I had been terrified of my father for the first 19 years of my life. Indeed, I never saw my father as a person but rather as a dark shadow with a club. My father had a temper that was aimed at us children and at my mother. [Yet my father is a very loving person. [...] I love my father deeply. [...] I didn’t want my friends to know my father spanked us. [...] I was always afraid to bring friends home for fear my mother and father might argue and embarrass me. [...]

[...] Your father was home in the afternoon. They were in the bedroom, your mother and your father. [...] You interpreted her cry as one of helplessness and frustration and your father had hurt her. You came into the room; your father jumped up and chased you away.

[...] You were terrified of the male, your father. [...] At the same time, you hope and pray subconsciously that the man will disappoint you because this male in your mind has godlike qualities that attract you; on the other, you see him as all powerful and as one who gives out punishment and one who is unreasoning and cruel because you felt that your father was cruel. [...] Your terror as a child gave you an inner idea of reality and family group whereby you saw yourself completely powerless and helpless under the domination of this father figure. [...]

[...] The death of the student’s father had taken place on Thursday, November 11 of that year; Jane’s father, Delmer, died without forewarning on the following Tuesday, November 16; Jane came through with Sumari in class one week later, on November 23; and the next night, in the 598th session, Seth discussed Sumari for the first time.

(Part of my surprise stemmed from what I’d taken to be my knowledge of Jane’s relationship with her father. Her parents had divorced when she was two years old, and since her mother did not remarry Jane grew up without a father.² Jane and “Del” met again, briefly, when she became 21 years old in 1950. After Jane and I married a few years later we occasionally visited her father in various parts of the country — but still, we hadn’t seen him for several years before his death. [...]

Besides the physical relationships that each of you know, therefore, you have other brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, on a psychic level; and to that degree, you are not alone. [...]

(Billie was the third wife of Jerry’s father, and she had been married once before herself. She caught the father “running around,” Jerry said, and raised hell. [...]

(Jerry had recently sent some of her elderly father’s clothes to be cleaned. [...]

[...] Neither Jerry nor her father had seen the note before, and it had a strong emotional effect on both of them. [...]

(Jimmy of course related to Marian his thoughts about seeing his father’s apparition. Doing a little figuring concerning the time, he arrived at the conclusion that Marian had had her experience at approximately the same time he had been standing in back of his mother’s house, thinking about his father. Jimmy speculated that perhaps Marian had received a message from his father, in answer to his wish, even though he, Jimmy, had seen or heard nothing.

[...] His father had died a few months ago, and while he stood in the backyard, a place he knew and had loved since childhood, Jimmy thought to himself: “Now, if I could see my father’s apparition, then I could tell Ma, and she’d feel a lot better,” or words to that effect. [...]

[...] He reminded me somewhat of Bill Macdonnel's father, but it was not him. I also recall a small pencil drawing Bill has done of his father in a similar position, but from a full-face angle.)

Your father wanted it but would not pay the price for it. [...] She never understood the desire for freedom from worldly concerns that is part of your father’s nature, and of all your natures. It was because your father was not willing to pay the price that he was attracted to your mother, although other elements also entered in here.

[...] Ella was my father’s sister and died at 88. My mother and father and my brother Loren and his wife and son were also there. [...]

[...] And when your parents visited her, your mother and father played the part in the beginning of the grand lady and condescending gentleman, for your father considered tailoring beneath a man.

In another system of reality your father was — in fact, still is — a well-known inventor, who never married but used his mechanically creative abilities to the fullest while avoiding emotional commitment. [...] At one time, then, in your father’s past as you think of it, having met Stella, he did not marry her after all. [...]

[...] Each of them died at the age of 81 — my father in 1971, my mother in 1973. For those who are interested, I drew a likeness of my father for one of my pen-and-ink illustrations in Jane’s Dialogues, and incorporated an image of my mother in another one. [...]

[...] Your father loved it but never trusted it. [...]

The father of the child however was a sister of yours in that life. [...] The sister was older than yourself, and you felt, favored over you by your father.

[...] You felt that she had taken your mother’s place in the affections of your father and she lorded her position over you. [...]

You used to wonder what there was about her that so captivated your father, since he had an obvious preference for her, and you would watch her secretly trying to find the answer. [...]

That led you, just below normal consciousness, to consider the relationship between father and daughter, and then to think of Ruburt’s father, Del. [...]

(First, I was hiking with her father Del along mountain trails in very deep snow. [...]

This also signified your knowledge on other levels that Ruburt was becoming free of any negative beliefs that were the result of his relationship with his father.