“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In the last session, Seth began discussing separate photographs of Jane and me [taken at the ages of 12 and 2, respectively] in connection with his ideas about probable selves. Since we wanted Seth to continue with the same material tonight, we looked the pictures over again while waiting for him to come through. Then, without greetings:)

Now: When I speak of probable selves, of course I am not speaking of some symbolic portion of the personality structure, or using the idea of probabilities as an analogy.

In those terms the identity at birth is composed of a variety of such “selves,” with their nuclei, and from that bank the physical personality has full freedom to draw. Ruburt’s mystical nature was such a strong portion of the entire identity that in his present reality, and in the probable reality chosen — as mentioned when I discussed this picture (of Jane) — the mystic impulses and expressions were given play. Intersections with probable realities occur when one psychic grouping intensifies to a certain point, so that fulfillment as a self results.

Had it been given extra force through your environment, circumstances, or your own intent, then either your artistic self would have become subservient or complementary; or, if the energy selves were of nearly equal intensity, then one of them would have become an offshoot, propelled by its own need for fulfillment into a probable reality. Do you follow me?

Your mother loved physical reality and took the greatest pleasure in its most minute aspects, for all of her complaints. Your father loved it but never trusted it. Each of your parents had their strongest reality, this time, and in your terms, in a probable system of reality — and here (in this reality) they were offshoots. To them this system always seemed strange.²

By far, the creative, mechanically inventive personality began to outstrip the other. The father that you knew was the probable self, therefore. That probable self, however, dealt with emotional realities that the other avoided, and this was indeed his sole intent.

This was a great fulfillment on his part, for the inventor did not trust himself to feel much emotion, much less give birth to emotional beings. In that other probability in which your parents originally met, your mother married a doctor, became a nurse, and helped her husband in his practice. She became an independent woman, and — again in your historical context — when it took some doing for a woman to distinguish herself.

Her energy was such that it spilled over into this system with your father, however. Someday I will try to explain this more clearly, in terms of energy patterns. Historically, however, many probabilities exist at once. When your mother died in her 50’s in one probable system, your mother in this system was the recipient of energy that then returned.

Your father’s greatest vitality was in the inventor’s reality, and so in your terms this one suffered. This does not mean that each personality, regardless of probabilities, is not endowed with free will, and so forth. Each is born, in whatever system, from a source gestalt energy, and develops.

When your picture was taken, therefore, your parents were already living in a probable reality, but you and [your brother] Linden were not. Now take your break.

(Some quick figuring showed us that the 50’s for my mother had encompassed the years 1942–51. From my present viewpoint I had no idea if she’d consciously or unconsciously experienced any influx of energy resulting from the death of a probable self during that decade. In those days the Buttses didn’t think in such terms, for one thing; for another, I was absent from the family home in Sayre for much of that time. In 1947, for example, when my mother was 55 years old, I was 28 and living in New York City. I wasn’t to meet Jane for five years. And even if Stella Butts were still living, I think it would be difficult to question her about an event that would have taken place approximately a quarter of a century ago.

(I told Jane now that had my mother received any additional energy during her 50’s, she might have expressed its benefits through the habitual mores of our society, in terms of changes rather than of probabilities, say “My life changed for the better at that point, when I made that decision.” I added that perhaps the important thing for us now was to observe our unfolding lives with Seth’s ideas of the larger, or whole self, in mind, and so achieve insights we could interpret in terms of probabilities. So we decided not to ask Seth to backtrack and give us material about the son my mother’s probable self had had in her reality, even though that son was a probable self of mine.

Now: There are basically no limitations to the self, and all portions of the self are connected — so the probable selves are aware, unconsciously, of their relationships.

None of this is predetermined. An offshoot probable self might leave your reality at age 13, say, but could intersect with you again at age 30 for a variety of reasons — where to you, you suddenly change a profession, or become aware of a talent you thought you had forgotten, and find yourself developing it with amazing ease.

(To me again:) Your birth (in 1919) coincided with the birth of your mother’s child in that other reality, hence her stronger feelings toward you. Your birth, and that of your youngest brother (Richard) were highly charged for her — yours for the reasons just given, and your brother’s because it represented the time of your mother’s hysterectomy in that other reality. In this reality, Richard’s birth represented your father’s final attempt to deal with emotional reality. Both of your parents imbued the third son with the strongest emotional qualities of their natures. Your mother had him defiantly, after the usual childbirth age (she was 36) almost reacting against that [probable] hysterectomy. In this world, she could and would have another child.

(11:02.) Give us a moment … I told you (in the last session) that in one probability Ruburt was a nun, expressing mysticism in a highly disciplined context, where it must be watched so that it does not get out of hand. Because there is an unconscious flow of information and experience here, you have one of the reasons for Ruburt’s caution in some psychic matters, and his fear of leading people astray. There were three offshoots: one, the nun, with mysticism conventionally expressed, but under guarded circumstances; one, the writer who veiled mystical experience through art; and one, the Ruburt you know, who experienced mystical experience directly, teaches others to do the same, and forms through writing a wedding of the two aspects. You have known two of those selves, then, and you were present at Ruburt’s birth with Idea Construction.

2. I think that as a child I often sensed my parents’ feelings of strangeness about this reality, although I was quite unable to express myself in those terms. Perhaps I’m reinterpreting old memories in the light of Seth’s material here. Consciously, however, I knew nothing then about probable realities or the power of belief; I was just acutely aware of the unending differences of opinion between my mother and father, and of my unformed questions about the reasons for their behavior; at the same time I saw them struggling to live like others I knew. I don’t think I even discussed my confused feelings with my brothers as we grew older. On several occasions Seth has given very blunt, very perceptive interpretations of the churning relationship involving my parents. That material is too long and complex to excerpt here, but I’d like to treat it separately sometime.

3. While dealing with emotional realities in this life, my father also exercised very considerable mechanical abilities. According to Seth’s ideas, these would have represented bleed-throughs from his “inventor” probable reality.

6. Jane covers our York Beach “dancing episode” in Chapter 2 of The Seth Material, and also quotes information Seth gave us on it in later sessions. The mystifying event took place during our vacation in York Beach, Maine, in August, 1963, a few months before Jane began to speak for Seth. At the time we understood little of what happened; yet the event represented a key episode at the very beginning of our psychic education; for in a crowded, smoky hotel barroom Jane and I unknowingly created physical “personality fragments” of ourselves — then came face to face with them. In the 9th session for December 18, 1963, Seth explained what we had been up to, and called our creations “fragments of our selves, thrown-off materializations of your own negative and aggressive feelings.” (Naturally, the more Seth told us about the human ability to generate such forms, the more questions we had!) In that 9th session Seth also used his term, “probable self,” for the first time.