“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Not long after I closed my eyes I saw, almost in silhouette, a Roman soldier standing on the top of a square, crenelated tower that formed a corner or angle in a massive stone wall. My position was at ground level. I’d lost all sensation of my body lying on the cot. The scene was very faint, so much so that it might almost be called more of an idea than an image. The sky behind the soldier was darkly overcast; I was aware of very little color. I ‘knew’ that the tower I faced marked the southeastern corner of Jerusalem, and I ‘knew’ that the wall itself was an enormous fortification that had surrounded that ancient city sometime during the first half of the first century A.D.

“What would a Roman soldier be doing up there?, I wondered. For below, on the flat ground outside the wall, were the hordes⁴ of the Roman army. I don’t know whether they were preparing for an attack, or had some other reason to be assembled there. I saw only a forest of helmets and spears pointing upward, with light glinting dully on metal here and there. I write ‘saw,’ yet it would be just as accurate to note that I sensed these figures. They were turned toward the soldier on the tower.

“Somehow, without being able to see them, I knew that stone or clay steps rose up the back of the tower, clear to the top where the soldier posed. He didn’t move. Try as I would, I couldn’t make his image any clearer or closer, or induce it to change in any other manner. What I did perceive was remarkably steady and lasted for several minutes, at least. I can still summon it to my mind’s eye when I want to. It came to me that the soldier was 43 years old and had two male children — where they were, I didn’t know. Like an echo in the background lingered a woman, but I couldn’t get anything about her.

“Now the scene changed, as one might change a slide in a projector. In another little drama, motionless like the first one, I saw my Roman soldier suspended in the act of falling from the tower. He had, in truth, been thrown off it, and I believe that he was either dead or mortally wounded from stab wounds. He had a bandage wrapped around the biceps of his left arm. Now I knew that a ‘task force’ of other Roman soldiers had carried out this assault, reaching ‘me’ by climbing the steps already described. I saw no sign of others on the tower, though. I kept this second image in mind for some time before allowing myself to realize that the victim fell amid a group of his fellows. One of them, I believe, ran a spear into the body.

[...] The people compared themselves to the rest of the world at times, and many of the young were beginning to leave, but those villages were, again, very like those in the times of Nebene and the Roman soldier. They had been plundered at times by wandering Roman soldiers of Rome’s empire. Some of the soldiers themselves had been recruited from such areas, leaving their families behind, and the old men to do the work. [...]

[...] There were many such villages in the mountains in the overall times of Nebene and your Roman soldier, and they were much in character like the villages recently destroyed in the earthquake. [...]

[...] It was one that Nebene knew of and respected, where the Roman soldier scoffed at what even then he considered the old ways. [...]

[...] (Pause.) The Roman soldier had been in several skirmishes in such a village, stealing livestock for his companions. [...]

[...] a soldier... [...] The twin who was in the military found his sense of identity as a soldier within the system, but he had great faith in the system... [...] You sort of resented the fact that this twin brother of yours had this organization in which he found support and in which he felt so a part because he was absolutely certain of the aims and goals of the organization and he was a good soldier within it... [...]

You had a brief life as twins—some definite clear-cut divisions within yourself, have to do with this life when you were one of two—one going one way, and one going the other—one twin had a strong leaning toward military things—a soldier—the organization of the church now serves the same purpose, I believe—security within the organization—the twin who was in the military found his sense of identity as a soldier within the system, but he had great faith in the system—in what he was doing—the other twin was more given to a statesman-like sort of thing—and was in fact an orator, although he had another profession—it included oration to people—the two of you had a very strong telepathic relationship—and this time the church has provided the same kind of organization—you sort of resented the fact that this twin brother of yours had this organization in which he found support and in which he felt so a part because he was absolutely certain of the aims and goals of the organization and he was a good soldier within it—and at that time you envied him that security and that sense of identity within the system in which he believed. [...]

(Soldu no) Soldier.

(“Who were you a soldier for?”)

[...] Last month he also saw himself as a Roman soldier aboard a slave ship. He previously had experience that convinced him that he was a man called Nebene.⁹ All of this could have been accepted quite easily in conventional terms of reincarnation, but Joseph felt that Nebene and the Roman soldier had existed during the same general time period, and he was not sure where to place the woman (but see Note 1).

The Roman soldier dreams of the black woman, and of Joseph. [...] Now the Roman soldier and Nebene and the woman went their separate ways after death, colon: They contributed to the world as it existed, in those terms, and then followed their own lines of development, elsewhere, in other realities. [...]

(At the conclusion of the 720th session I mentioned the Roman-soldier visions I’d had near the end of October, and added that I would soon go into my questions about them. [...]

12. My Roman-soldier self might have “followed authority without question,” as Seth states in this (721st) session, yet he must have behaved with more than a little guile. [...]

NIRVANA, RIGHT IS MIGHT,
ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS, AND THE
HUMAN BODY AS A PLANET WORTH SAVING

We will continue dictation, starting a new chapter, to be called: “Nirvana, Right is Might, Onward Christian Soldiers, and the Human Body as a Planet Worth Saving.”

[...] If you consider them as soldiers guarding the barriers or the boundaries, then you would have to imagine a strange creature, our particle, as a soldier on a boundary facing toward and away from the country in question.

[...] Good night, Ruburt, you soldier, you.

[...] You do share psychic memories, and hold in common the memories of other selves who did live in the time of the Roman-soldier incident.

[...] I called my version of it my “fourth Roman,” and presented an account of it in Appendix 22; through internal pictures I saw, in Jerusalem in the first century A.D., the violent death of my traitorous Roman-soldier counterpart.

[...] Once you ‘killed your enemy,’ (and therefore yourself) — like the Roman soldier in Jerusalem — and realized it, did something change the counterpart connection? [...]

[...] You do share psychic memories, and hold in common the memories of other selves who did live in the time of your (fourth) Roman-soldier incident.

[...] Without thinking, I casually remarked that currently I had three things going reincarnationally¹ — involving the Roman soldier, the black woman, and Nebene — and that if I could untangle their time sequences, I could use them as part of a chronological list of my “past” lives.

[...] What I’m getting is that the idea of just one life in any given time is bullshit — the psyche is so rich that it can have more than one life in one time period, like your Nebene and Roman soldier living together in the first century. [...]

1. For material on the Roman soldier, see the first notes for sessions 715–16; on Maumee and Nebene, see notes 1 and 9, respectively in the 721st session.

That sort of exposure, in your terms, has not happened before, and of itself it forces both mind and heart to question some dictates that have been taken for granted in the past—for in the past almost any kind of destruction or war or violence was justified if it was done in God’s name, or if the soldiers were marching “on the side of right.”

I’ve become quite interested in such an achievement in view of my recent but very limited successes in touching upon several personal “past” involvements: the two nameless Roman soldiers, and the woman called Maumee. [...]

One of the Roman soldiers, Maumee, and Nebene are mentioned in Appendix 21; see the excerpts there from the private session for November 18, 1974, as well as Note 1. Then see the comments Seth made the next evening in ESP class: “There are, of course, future memories as well as past ones … As Joseph often says: ‘When you think of reincarnation, you do so in terms of past lives.’ You are afraid to consider future lives because then you have to face the death that must be met first, in your terms. [...]

[...] A brother who is a soldier. [...]

[...] (a one minute pause at 9:06.) There is some reincarnational influence, in that you and she were acquaintances (long pause), of a minor variety, however—once in your Roman soldier existence, and I believe in the Denmark one. [...]

[...] You do not appreciate your own dream, or your appreciation of it is too remote—and yes, it does contain some reincarnational data, for it shows you a moment in a life when a decision was made, even though the emotional disgust that you felt at the time was separated from you—for the mouse at the time stood not only for itself but also for the victims of war, burned bodies you had seen while soldiers went about the remains to see what loot might be left.

Ferd was a soldier, I believe. [...]

[...] The child may easily dream of being its own mother or father, sister or brother, the family dog, a fly, a soldier. [...]

He was carried along somehow in a national rebellion; a minor character in this, following soldiers, seeking for the scores of ballads.