“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday afternoon, to my surprise, I had still another internal vision experience with a Roman counterpart self of mine in the first century A.D.; it was reminiscent of my three Romans of last October, yet perplexing, too — for this time I saw a different Roman counterpart. See Appendix 22 for my own material on the event, plus Seth’s comments about it in ESP class last night, plus a quite unusual “confirmation” offered by class member Sue Watkins. My Jamaica experience of November 16 is also referred to by another student.

You choose ahead of time your environment and purposes. This greater personage then has earthly counterparts, each individual alive taking part in the vital human drama of any given century. Each learns from the others, and the counterparts fit together like mosaics — except that these mosaics are fully endowed with independence and free will. So the individuals alive upon the body of the earth at any given time fit together as beautifully as the cells do within your individual body at a particular time (most emphatically).

Psychically, you are made up of counterparts, as physically you come from various races. There are far more counterpart groupings than there are races, but then your definition of races is arbitrary. Period. Counterparts can be better related to physical families, for you might well have four or five counterparts alive in one century, as you might have four or five family members spanning the same amount of time. Basically, however, counterparts deal with fulfillments and developments that transcend races or countries.

Give us a moment … Your individual experience then becomes a part of your own greater personage, but at the same time you unconsciously draw upon the knowledge of that personage and use it for your purposes: You become an offshoot, so to speak. You are unconsciously aware of the experiences of “your” counterparts, as they are of yours, and you use that information to round out your own. Period.

Give us a moment … Certain abilities can be developed with much greater ease in particular time periods — in a highly industrialized technology, for example — and those interested in that kind of an environment did not generally appear in the eras of the cavemen, simply because those alive at that time were working with different challenges. So this hypothetical greater identity also chooses to be born in different time periods, historically speaking; and the same pattern appears in which counterparts are born as individuals, each biologically and spiritually connected, but with great intertwinings and variations, as with a physical family tree.

In its way, then, each century has its own integrity at all levels. The identity of each living person is always “brand new.” Yet its rich psychic heritage connects it through memory and experience to those who will “come after,” or those who have “gone before.” You are closer to some family members than others, and you are closer to some counterparts than others.

New paragraph. Those incidents are recorded unconsciously, however, if they applied to your direct experience; and under hypnosis, for example, you could make them your own. So there are different kinds of memories. You share certain biological similarities with your parents, but there are other biological groupings not understood, uniting counterparts in any given century.

Organ transplants, for example, could be accepted more easily from counterparts, so that you have a kind of inner subspecies, or subfamily if you prefer, that operates within the regular physical divisions that you recognize.

Telepathic messages flash more quickly from one counterpart to another.

Give us a moment … Some of your counterpart’s memories may appear in your dream states, where they show up as fantasies, perhaps, to you.

Now: Your friend Peter [Smith] shared the same earthly period.⁴ You were not counterparts — or you are not counterparts, but closely enough allied so that in certain terms you “share” some of the same psychic memories, like cousins who speak about old dimly remembered brothers.

(12:05. After adding a few sentences of personal information for Jane, Seth ended the session at 12:07 A.M. Jane had experienced internal images while delivering some of the book material, yet hadn’t been able to get them clearly. One image had to do with an analogy involving plants and counterparts, she said; in it, the leaves of the plants “gave out” messages as counterparts did. But she couldn’t elaborate upon this verbally.

(2. Once when Jane woke up she had the idea of “counterparts and four-fronted selves” in mind. As she wrote today: “There might be four counterparts alive in one general time period — a century — for example. These form a psychic ‘block’, and any of the four can pick up information from this joint pool [of identity]. Each person is distinct, yet each is an added dimension of the others, so that on different levels the four [in this case] create an alliance and become a four-fronted counterpart self; covering a given century … This is a ‘working alliance’ that exists in potential form always. But the four-fronted counterpart self’s own sense of continuity is not broken up; it persists outside of space and time, while its parts — the individual selves, or counterparts — live in space and time….”⁶

(Now for two concluding paragraphs of commentary and reference: Jane’s statement that the four-fronted counterpart self persists outside of space and time implies a contradiction, of course — but this situation is one that we, as physical creatures, will in some manner always have to contend with when we encounter certain of Jane’s and Seth’s concepts [including that of the four-fronted counterpart self]. Seth’s own idea of “simultaneous time,” that “all exists at once, yet is not completed,” has run throughout his material since its inception over a decade ago. As he quite humorously commented in the 14th session for January 8, 1964: “… for you have no idea of the difficulties involved in explaining time to someone who must take time to understand the explanation.” Yet Seth’s simultaneous time isn’t an absolute, for, as he also told us in that session: “While I am not affected by time on your plane, I am affected by something resembling time on my plane … To me time can be manipulated, used at leisure and examined. To me your time is a vehicle, one of several by which I can enter your awareness. It is therefore still a reality of some kind to me [my emphasis]. Otherwise I could not utilize it in any way whatsoever.”⁷

6. A note added a few days later: In revised form, Jane did soon discuss her material on “counterparts and four-fronted selves” in Politics. See Chapter 12.