“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The material on counterparts emerged from Seth’s treatment of reincarnation. Along with his addition of simultaneous time, I’d say that the concept of counterparts provides reincarnation with a novel approach indeed; and that our awareness of both has always been latent within the reincarnational framework, whether in simultaneous or linear terms.

(Now I’d like to present a batch of notes, ideas, and excerpts from sessions about reincarnation, counterparts, and related data, pulling them together into a coherent picture. Although reincarnation and its variations has been discussed by Seth almost from the very beginning of our sessions, the subject didn’t represent one of our own main concerns. For that matter, Jane almost actively resisted such information in the past. She still says comparatively little about reincarnation on her own, although Seth shows no such reservations.

(In our private session, Seth commented on my “quite legitimate” reincarnational data involving the black woman, Maumee or Mawmee, who’d lived on the Caribbean island of Jamaica early in the 19th century. He went on to say:) You helped that woman. Your present sense of security and relative detachment gave her strength. She knew she would survive, because she was aware of your knowledge. I will say more about it, but for now that is the end of the session. Ruburt has had enough for a night.

(“I wish you hadn’t said that, Rob,” Jane answered, somewhat ruefully. “Now I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff on reincarnation and time. So let’s get it down.”

(“All right,” she said finally. “I’ll just tell you this: The whole idea of reincarnation is all screwed up. To unscramble it would really be confusing. 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. But if you tell people that, you’ll just get them all mixed up.”

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. And so you never think of future selves, or how you might benefit from knowing them….

(To Florence:) Far be it from me to disturb your ancient ideas of yin and yang, or Jung, or good and evil, or of right and wrong, or of good and bad vibrations! I was beginning a new body of material, and so we have not finished with it by a long shot! What I hope to say is that your world exists in different terms than those you recognize, and that reincarnation is indeed a myth and a story that stands for something else entirely.

In a way that will be explained in another book for those interested in such matters, there is a kind of coincidence with all of these present points of power⁸ that exist between you and your “reincarnational” selves. There are even biological connections in terms of cellular “memory.”

(Though Frank Withers never used the word “counterpart,” we see now that this can be a reference to the concept of simultaneous reincarnations, to that of counterparts, or to both.

I could list a few other past lives I’m supposed to have known, and so could Jane. Some of those we’ve picked up on our own. Over the years Seth has also come through with a modest number of reincarnational experiences involving the three of us, as well as others concerning any two of us. Examples are given in Appendix 18. But Jane and I are more intrigued by passages in Appendix 18 like this one, from the 398th session for March 11, 1964: “Personalities are not static things. Entities are eternal. They are not as nicely nor as neatly packaged out, one to a body, as your psychologists believe.”