“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A portrait must contain a searching and a deep statement of the human condition, a reaching out toward the mystery that is another person, whether the person exists in your mind, or physical reality, or both. A portrait must contain a journey into personality, and the technique and the form will then follow naturally and spontaneously.

[...] The first is to paint a portrait of a person whom you know, trying to portray the essence of that person, their deepest agonies and highest joys, their highest capabilities and fears of failure. (Pause.) This would induce on your part an honest effort to face the raw emotion of another personality, and portray it.

[...] Once we begin my book, there will still be some interruptions for the other personality may sometimes also speak. [...]

[...] This has never been a problem with me personally, but I didn’t interrupt to make a point of this. [...]

[...] You may be interested to some degree, dear Doctor Instream, in the sort of personality through whom I speak. I wanted a personality who was at the same time both intelligent and intuitional. [...] Yet I also wanted a personality which would allow itself the spontaneity necessary, and the inner freedom, so that such communications could take place. A personality without basic stability would not serve my purposes, and a personality that was too rigid in its beliefs and abilities would not serve my purposes well.

If I speak to you personally in what may seem to you a frivolous manner, it is because I am concerned with the personal contact between us this evening; for the personal contact between us will insure that you read what I have said, and I will indeed get my way.

You must also understand that I work to some extent within the human limitations of Ruburt’s own personality, and you have underestimated that personality. You have not underestimated my personality.

I am no secondary personality. There is no case of multiple personality here. What you have if you take advantage of it, is Ruburt’s personality, which with Joseph’s help is capable and willing to perceive more than one reality at once. [...]

[...] You yourselves adopt personality, though you are usually not aware of doing so. So I adopt a personality that can communicate with your own. [...]

[...] My characteristics as they are displayed through the personality, therefore, come from you as well as from Ruburt.

Triggers were needed also to initiate my emergence through that personality I display into your world. [...]

[...] (Humorously:) My personality, as it so richly presents itself, is (louder:)to some extent a joint creation of yours. [...]

[...] Personal association, therefore, is highly involved with your personal bank of symbols, and it operates in the dream states precisely as in waking life — but with greater freedom, and drawing from the future, in your terms, as well as from the past.

[...] In the following deep protected areas of sleep, the higher centers of the inner self are allowed to function and come to the aid of the three-dimensionally oriented portion of the personality. [...]

[...] These represent your personal symbol bank as far as your present life is concerned.

[...] When I referred to your personal bank of symbols, I meant to specify that this bank was yours from the day of your birth and before. [...]

([Nadine.) “Would it be possible, like, to have a husband and wife that were, when they were gotten together, you would have a great person with opposite personalities, could they possibly be two probable selves?”)

[...] If you understood me, you would realize then that you are highly unique, and that those problems and challenges that you have can be met by no others, and that those private elements of your personal life that seem so uncosmic are, indeed, of great importance. [...] And you help untold numbers of personalities in other realities. [...]

[...] And when each of you come together in a personal relationship are you then glorifying and adding to the reality of the consciousness that is within those atoms and molecules. [...] But if you demand the best that is within you then you become more than you realize that you are, and you must also demand more from the other persons within your relationship. [...]

Indeed, within each entity is the possibility for unlimited personalities. [...]

The uniqueness that is your own personality is to be cherished. [...] The particular purpose of your present (underlined) personality can only be met in the present circumstances, in the way that is best overall. [...]

[...] You take it for granted that this form and this personality, like all your other personalities, is unique, with purpose that it alone can best (underlined) achieve.

[...] You do not let yourself realize the spontaneity and joyful burst that is your inner self, that results in this present human personality that you call yourself. [...]

You set yourself against all of this, against the gist of life and joy and vitality, and turn your back upon it with the paltry excuse: “If one person does not love me in a male-female relationship in this life, then I threaten to destroy myself, and shatter the form that holds the spirit, and shatter the form like a glass thrown upon the floor, like a child in a tantrum.” [...]

(And: “A chapter on a person’s ‘Effective Personal Reality’ — about the private purposes in one’s life, and the bounds of creaturehood as set by your body; what you choose to be born with as far as health, disease, poverty or wealth, ability, etc., are concerned.”

I have one small but important personal note for Ruburt….

[...] This is still evocative material, even though she doesn’t know whether Seth will use any of it in his book: “For a ‘Power Chapter’: Each person has his or her own ‘psychic territory of power’ which is not to be relinquished,” she wrote. [...]

[...] And the underweight person may actually eat less the harder he or she tries to eat more — the latter being interpreted as an impossibility by the overriding belief in the underweight condition.

What you are dealing with in many instances are exhibitions of various, sometimes quite diverse personality patterns of behavior—patterns that are, however, not as assimilated, or as smoothly operative as they are in the person you call normal. The patterns are seen in an exaggerated fashion, so that in some such cases at least you can gain glimpses of mental, emotional, and psychic processes that usually remain psychologically invisible beneath the more polished or “finished” social personality of the usual individual.

[...] Such persons use the various elements of the personality as spies or soldiers, scattering their forces (pause), and forced under those conditions to set up elaborate communication systems to keep those portions of the self in contact with each other. [...]

[...] On the other hand, the person feels unable to use energy in a normal fashion, since in the ordinary world no venture could live up to the superior self’s exaggerated ideals. The person then becomes frightened of pitting himself against the world, or committing himself to ordinary actions, since he feels that in the light of such comparisons he can only debase himself.

There is always an overall order to the personality, even though it is in the background, so that in any given case all of the separate “selves,” or other sources with whom the individual feels in contact, would together point toward the totality, or unity, that lies beneath. The outstanding mental phenomena, therefore, show in isolated fashions those elements of the personality that are not to be assimilated in the usual smooth fashion.

[...] Dreams, having an electrical reality as I explained, must be decoded to have meaning to various levels of the subconscious and the personality. [...]

The various levels of the subconscious and the personality are attuned to the particular intensities of the dream experience which they can perceive and interpret, and which has meaning to them. [...]

[...] Psychological reality, emotional reality, and the reality of thought also become valid to human personality through their existence as various intensities. [...]

The mind then formulates meaningful psychological symbols, but still in terms of electric symbol, and only in the brain are the particular symbols then sent to the various levels of the human personality.

[...] Even when you thrust a pain apart from yourself and give it as a heritage to a fragment personality, you give it also your creative power and your hopes. You do not set these personalities adrift without hope or potential.

[...] In the materialization of personality through various reincarnations only the ego and layers of personal subconscious adapt new characteristics. [...]

[...] What do they have to do with the development of personality as we think of it? [...] One night, Rob asked Seth how our own egos had changed as a result of our sessions, however, and Seth used the question as an opportunity to give us more information about personality and probable selves.

Now, the inner self is psychologically influenced by these probable personalities, for they represent a whole personality structure or gestalt with which you are utterly unfamiliar. [...]

[...] Should not be pampered for the personality is already given to indulgence. [...] in 801 as an uncle then a warrior-type personality, but again given to indulgence. [...]

[...] But our new student does not know this person... [...] This personality is also a student of mine and a practice teacher.

[...] You must realize that within this room, and within any room, at any time there are other personalities that you do not perceive. [...]

[...] The personality should not be indulged, but it should not be shown dissonance... [...]

[...] For example, the personality may be led back to the events prior to the decision. Then the personality is allowed to change the decision. [...]

[...] If an individual considers identity strongly in terms of male or female identity, then such a person may refuse to accept the fact of the sexual changes that occur in reincarnational existences. This kind of sexual identification, however, also impedes personality development during physical life.

At the time of choosing, therefore, the personality is already preparing itself to leave for another existence. [...] There are cases in which a personality goes very quickly into another physical life, in perhaps a matter of hours. [...]

[...] There are no special “places” or situations or conditions set apart after physical death in which any given personality must have experience.

Nevertheless in his case an excess, fervent nature has always been in existence, and even now his enthusiasms are extremely fervent, and although a humorous exterior personality now shows its face, nevertheless the extremely authoritative and sometimes too rigid nature holds the personality presently in bounds.

There religious interests, therefore, are repeated in the present personality, but efforts are made to tie these ideas into the world of so-called reality. The interest in extrasensory perception, the interest in science and religion, all represent efforts on his part to tie various of his older personalities together, and to learn from their mistakes.

I have explained to you how the inner self is connected to the present personality, and how the emotions at your end change through the layers of the subconscious, begin in your plane as parts of the personality, and as part of your force field, and then are transformed and become the inner-sense connective that connects the outer ego to the inner self.

[...] Secondary personality problems that cannot be taken up by the personality in regular life, for various reasons, are worked out as you know. [...]

[...] For him personally the yoga should be a daily physical and psychic health measure. It will insure the mobility of the inner personality, and dissipate resistances before they accumulate.

The emergence of these psychic abilities was indeed resented by his ego, and initiated a necessary overhaul of personality, against which it protested. [...]

The other still-lingering symptoms will quickly vanish also; the pendulum sessions, quite apart from our sessions, should be maintained as a kind of personal psychic hygiene until the habit of communication is thoroughly established. [...]

[...] When the ego controls this resoluteness however, it turns into stubbornness, and works against the personality. [...]

A person who has been cruel in one life may choose to experience conditions in the next life in which he or she understands the meaning of cruelty, but this does not mean that such a person would then necessarily experience an entire lifetime as a victim.

[...] While I did she had some thoughts of her own — that a person can choose illness, for example, in order to explore that reality, and to exert certain effects upon others around the ill person: thoughts I have had many times — my old idea of consciousness getting to know itself in as many ways as possible.

[...] There are too many other elements that also apply to the human personality. [...]

Dictation: I am not implying that all social workers are driven by personal problems. [...]

Since the source is not understood, no exterior manipulation in the social structure will be effective enough, and the person involved will see the problem personified in every issue. [...]

The same sort of reaction occurs if you concentrate upon a personal illness, and then find any improvements insignificant because of the great focus of your attention upon the negative aspects.

[...] The man who has believed that he was evil may now see the world, or persons of another faith or political affiliation, as evil instead. [...]

(Prior to the session Jane and I had a discussion as to the exact profession of the person who had written the many notes on the manuscript of her ESP book. [...] Neither of us thought the person in question a psychologist. [...]

[...] As an overall personality, I have always been concerned with ideas. I am not emotionally in strong connection with any personalities known to Frank Watts, for example. [...]

(These sessions began when we contacted the Frank Watts personality through the Ouija board, in December 1963. The Frank Watts personality was replaced in the 4th session by Seth. [...]

[...] They will take us a bit away from our main lines of discussion, and they have to do with communication between essence personalities and those still within the physical system.

There are tendencies and conflicts that have been with the personality in other existences, that have influenced his nature as he vacillated between spontaneity, usually exaggerated, and overdiscipline; in some lives a great lack of concern for the welfare of others, that could be called an innocent callousness, a joyful, utterly spontaneous personality with little idea of practicality. [...]

Other portions of the personality, while recognizing this, still felt that the personality as a whole needed to impose some restraints upon what it regarded as flamboyantly spontaneous qualities. [...]

[...] It is the first time, so to speak, that the personality, seriously tried to merge them, and yet for prime development and fulfillment this had to be accomplished. The personality regards this as a challenge of the highest order, but strains naturally develop.

[...] In this life until very recently the personality has been involved with highly charged, volatile emotional personalities. [...]

(9:25.) Each such personality, however, comes with a built-in idea of the reality in which it will operate, and its mental equipment is highly tailored to meet very specialized environments. [...] Within the personality, however, in the most secret recesses, is the condensed knowledge that resides in the computer as a whole. [...]

[...] Your personality as you now know it will indeed persevere, and with its memories, but it is only a part of your entire identity, even as your childhood in this life is an extremely important part of your present personality, though now you are far more than a child.

[...] But this computer is so highly endowed with creativity that each of the various personalities it programs spring into consciousness and song, and in turn create realities that may have been undreamed of by the computer itself.

Each personality has within it the ability not only to gain a new type of existence in the environment — in your case in physical reality — but to add creatively to the very quality of its own consciousness, and in so doing to work its way through the specialized system, breaking the barriers of reality as it knows it.

There is on the one hand a fear of demanding, and on the other hand a tendency to demand too much in personal relationships in which the other sex is involved. There is no commitment to an idea as such, and yet the personality is quite capable of such commitment.

[...] Or the person has connections with such a place. This is family or personal rather than business, I believe. [...]

[...] The personality then irresponsible but full of gaiety, with some effeminate characteristics from an earlier 9th century life. [...]

We find here now however a fairly rigid personality, with many prejudices, given to literal interpretations.