“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] I feel (as Seth mentioned in the 721st session) that I wasn’t Nebene, or two different Roman soldiers per se, but rather that my whole self chose to manifest such personalities together; that I, too, am such a manifestation at a “later” time, then, and that from my own vantage point I can tune in to those other lives. But I question, at least provisionally, any idea of past or counterpart lives that I lived one hundred percent. At this writing, I think that I am living my only one hundred percent life now, with the privilege of occasionally being able to focus upon scattered portions of those other existences emanating from my whole self, which has its basic reality outside of our space-time concepts.¹⁰

“Assuming that my internal data about those three lives are reasonably correct, it may be, as Jane said recently, that the psyche is so incredibly rich that anything is possible. [...] (Humorously:) I’ll have a hell of a time with my list of chronological lives (which I have yet to work on, by the way) if I start turning up a whole group of them in one historical period. [...]

[...] I think all of this could be counterpart action, all right, personified by two selves living in the same narrow time period, in close proximity in the same geographical area of the Middle East.⁸

[...] Counterparts all — three simultaneous lives in which I seemed to play a part, although, as explained below, I insist that I participated in each one of those existences in my own way.

The child who lived in the house until recently was somewhat disturbed, and had he lived there longer the house would not have remained psychically beneficial, but it is psychically beneficial now. [...]

In your time to come, if possible you would do well to live by an ocean or even a large lake. [...]

The man who lived in the house did have a destructive and sometimes cruel tendency. [...]

You are both handling your inner and outer lives to much greater advantage than you have been, and I foresee in general no difficulties as long as you adhere to your present course.

[...] The hillside is not yours, yet it is your view, and it has strong evocative connections with your creative lives. A definite change in living patterns and of psychic attitude will result, that would not happen in the house on Foster Avenue.

[...] Once you had it where you live now, for all of your criticism. [...]

At this time of your lives it is important that you act. [...]

Give us time … When you live in a house that belongs conspicuously to another age, you are to some extent avoiding the contemporary nature of life. [...]

[...] The large living room was so spacious just so that it could hold a grand piano. The man who owned the house thought of pianos as his art (he was in the business of selling them), and the living room was simply meant to set a piano off.

You find typical ranch-style homes, generally now, uncomfortable because — and this should be obvious — they are given over mainly to family living of a particular kind, colon: a kind that obviously separates work from living areas. [...]

(Now these notes hark back to the end of the 732nd session, when I wrote a paragraph concerning Sue Watkins, our longtime friend who attends class as often as she can these days from the small town where she now lives, some 35 miles north of Elmira. [...]

[...] These are not rigid parents, though, blindly following conventions, but people who see family life as a fine living creative art, and children as masterpieces in flesh and blood. [...]

[...] Neither of us were ever interested in turning out a series of just “psychic books” per se, devoid of all of those human and intimate details that are piling up during our lifetimes, enriching the moments and the days, the weeks and the years, creating the seamless wholes of our lives. I also believe that in ordinary terms each living entity on earth employs such a process of enrichment, tailoring it for its unique, individual purposes. [...]

I do feel that part of that enrichment involves a worldwide (and possibly universal) healing action, contributed to by each living form—that here on earth, at least, this vital force of our own creation sustains us in an unending grand synthesis of regeneration. [...]

(The dictionary tells us that the Stoic philosopher and statesman, Cato, was a Roman, and lived from 95—46 BC. He was called Marcus Porcius the Younger; his great grandfather, Marcus Porcius the Elder, was a Roman statesman who lived from 234—149 BC.

There were connections in past lives that united mother and son, of which they are both unconsciously aware. [...]

(At around 9:15 PM I was in the living room talking to Jane about her book on ESP. [...] I got up to look out the living room window, to try my mental experience of traveling across the Walnut St. bridge again, to “feel” myself doing it as before.

[...] The entire idea of the disclaimer is a living example of the book’s thematic material. [...] I consider such a disclaimer as a mildly amusing case in point: a living example—almost as if indeed you had requested one—a proof of the pudding. [...]

[...] Your lives are aware as they are meant to be. You have made no great errors in your lives. [...]

[...] Your living experiences often gave you clues one way or another that added to the thematic material. [...]

[...] Then relax and accept it—and remember, I have lived many physical lives as you are living physical lives now. [...]

[...] Even the gods know vulnerability—and that is why they live. [...]

Ruburt’s codicils represented a point of intuitional understanding, but he has not caught up to them in practical living.

[...] And again, a book may sell in the millions, and still go in one mental ear and out the other while our books literally do change lives—and to that extent the world—for the better.

You must remember also that greater context in which you live. [...]

[...] You must always remember that the self is not static, but a living gestalt of experience. [...]

[...] A person who dies at 17 may have experienced much greater dimensions of living, in your terms, than someone who lives to be 82. [...]

(Jane and I were also interested in the fact that we’d seldom been on Foster Avenue, even though it lay within comfortable walking distance of the apartment house we lived in on Water Street; nor could either of us recall having noticed the “Foster Avenue place” before. [...]

(That concentration upon places to live reminded us of families, of course — “regular” families as well as Seth’s families of consciousness. [...]

When I speak in terms of counterparts, then, or of reincarnational selves and probable selves, I am saying that in the true symphony of your being you are violins, oboes, cymbals, harps — in other words, you are a living instrument through which you play yourself. [...]

[...] You would just have another expansion of consciousness, another self-who-is-aware-of-being in the same way that — using an analogy, granted — the writer is aware of the self who lives, in those terms; is the self who lives while being in a position of some apartness, able to comment upon the life being lived.

[...] The greater part of your own identity, then, is completely aware of all of your conscious and unconscious living material. [...]

[...] You are then “lost” in the writing as much as you feared being lost in normal living, with no way to step aside and view the experience. [...]

[...] But even if you did, the very experience of other-consciousness itself would supersede your living space. [...]

[...] Yet I speak to you and I speak in a lively manner, for one dead. Therefore, when you are tempted to think of it as an end of all, then remember that you know a rather lively spirit and when you hear my voice speaking through Ruburt this evening then remember how hoarse it was before I began to speak, and know indeed that were I not such a gentleman, I could add considerably to its volume. [...]

This does not mean that the demonstration serves no purpose, for all of my demonstrations serve a purpose and this one is to show that there is indeed a vitality that lives beyond the grave and that there is joy, and the personality continues to exist for this most willing and friendly associative man can permit me to speak in the most fearless and carefree tones. [...]

[...] I wanted you to feel the impact of my personality as you would feel the impact of any living personality. [...]

They knew there was a third story to the house they lived in. [...] For one thing, of course, they lived (and still do) on the second floor. [...]

[...] In ways too numerous and personal to enumerate, the conditions of their lives became clear to them. They did not enjoy living in a cold, sodden environment for several weeks. [...]

(Smiling:) Now do you want to know why you stayed (in our living quarters) during the flood?

[...] They placed their lives on the line. [...]

[...] That is, the living room in the hill house is now her writing room, and her one-time writing room at the back, north side of the house has become the living room — or call it the den-and-television room. [...]

Each person alive helps paint the living picture of civilization as it exists at any given time, in your terms. [...] Your thoughts, feelings and expectations are like the living brush strokes with which you paint your corner of life’s landscape. [...]

[...] At other levels, however, you carry a picture of the world’s news, [one] that is “picked up” by signals transmitted by the c-e-l-l-s (spelled) that compose all living matter. [...]

(Through all of our personal activities, Jane and I are intensely conscious of the cultural, scientific, artistic, and economic aspects of the world we’ve chosen to live and work in. [...]

[...] So in certain terms everyone exists in Framework 2. Many people, however, live out their lives, practically speaking, in Framework 1. Ruburt’s physical condition has been most troublesome to you both, for in that area you have stressed impediments and felt a lack of control. Many people, however, experience such difficulty in all areas of their lives, with nothing in their own experience that they can trust to give them evidence for a greater reality or control over their own destinies.

[...] In his books he lives in and with the present. [...]

[...] In all other areas of your lives you have prided yourselves on the unpredictability, the creative ground-breaking concepts. [...]

By way of comment, and in reference to this discussion only, without taking other issues into consideration, your own parents for example operated largely in Framework 1 for their entire lives. [...]

[...] Many such people do not feel at all safe living under life’s usual conditions. [...]

(Long pause at 4:16.) Only when they pursue some death-defying career do such individuals feel safe enough to relax otherwise and live a fairly normal life outside of their death-defying careers.

[...] Self-understanding and self-knowledge may be able to change the individuals’ lives for the better, regardless of their activities or conditions of life. [...]

[...] People who feel powerless, and who find no cause for living, can come together then and “die for a cause” that did not give them the will or reason to live. [...]

People die for “a cause” only when they have found no cause to live by. [...]

Those who believe in the ultimate meaning of their lives can withstand such pressures, and often such dilemmas, and others like them, are resolved in an adequate-enough fashion. [...]

So while Seth’s books go out into the public world, the sessions themselves rise from our private lives. Yet those lives are lived in coexistence with a mass arena of events that brush against us gently at times, or drastically affect our days on other occasions. [...]

[...] What Seth is really saying here is that our impulses are meant to help us create our own realities on a personal basis in a way that will enhance both our private lives and our civilizations.

[...] Those theories, along with religion’s belief in the flawed self, have left their marks on all of our lives. [...]

The earliest poets were probably half shaman, half prophet, speaking for the forces of nature, for the “spirits” of the living and the dead, voicing their visions of man’s unity with the universe. [...]

[...] Here someone who’s associated with Reality Change, way out in Texas, and who knows about us through our work, has a relative who lives on Underwood Avenue.... [...] I added that even she must have been surprised when she first heard of us and realized that we lived in Elmira; she couldn’t have known, then, that we lived that close to Underwood Avenue, where she had a relative. [...]

[...] I’ve also learned that Fred has a wife, Heidi, and at least one daughter, and that he did—does —live in Denver, Colorado. [...]

[...] For the past week she has been visiting a relative who lives on Underwood Avenue here in town—not much more than a stone’s throw away. [...]