This is the last post on "Part One" of the book.
This is actually a defensive post not about archetype work, but about channeling. Except at the end.
ES seriously disses a couple identities I'm very fond of and grateful to. However, I'm working to open my mind to the idea that maybe he is right, and these are things I should consider seriously. So far... I'm more argumentative than musing, though. If there are good points to be made against my POV I would love them as comments. This is a subject that has a ton of superstition and little intelligent discourse, in my observation, and it's interesting and deserves better.
Jane Roberts was a woman, a writer and poet, who in the 1960's began experimenting with psychic functioning, initially with a Ouija board, and ended up -- after awhile -- 'channeling' an entity that called himself 'Seth.' There are many books written by Jane 'channeling' Seth, and by her-as-her. She had health issues for a very long time and finally died in the 1980s. Whatever else she might have been, she was very intelligent, very open minded, yet a critical thinker too (rare and invaluable to find that combo in people!), and one of the best poets I've ever read.
Seth, over time, said that Jane was an Aspect of him -- not the other way around which I believe is the norm for (healthy) channeling. She had a burning desire to know, he was a teacher, she looked inward and called for answers, and he answered the call. She was skeptical of this, fascinated but reserved especially initially, was always wondering if he could be caught in something inconsistent, and she and her mate Rob took and kept extensive notes on everything. In fact if you read a Seth book I recommend ignoring all the notes. They had such detail about their tracking him that it kinda distracts from the information in a way.
Her successful work with Seth was followed, shortly in, by a whole wave of channeling popularity that included some entities and channelers that, shall we say, are part of the reason modern channeling has such a bad name.
I might add that some of the most powerful works of occult literature in our time, including most all of Alice A. Bailey's work, The Urantia Book, and A Course in Miracles, are channeled materials. Also some occultists write "in the spirit" at times which means about the same thing -- channeling 'information/energy' as opposed to 'with identity included'. These people, these entities, and this information, is almost incomprehensibly different than the burbling crap you find in new-age bookstores -- the latter stuff being from the cosmic alien channeled through the walk-in telling you why you're an indigo child and special, and that'll be only $399 for that next conference on why the stars say this is a special time for special people like you.
I personally felt -- maybe still feel -- that most "identity" channeling amounts to voluntary temporary possession. However I think whether one is bringing forth "an aspect of themselves", vs. "the wandering dead guy I met during the Seance" -- or even "the person in focus in this remote viewing session" -- I think this is a different thing, in both experience and in result. I am not really saying any are good or bad, I'm just saying that "opening to a part of yourself" is not quite the same as "hosting someone you don't know" in my opinion. One is evoking-from, one is invoking-into.
And I think the hosting of a stranger, if you were doing it on purpose, may be a useful means to an end if it works (eg for psi info). Whether it is bad or dangerous I don't know. Maybe a little of both. But so is eating donuts, crossing against the light, and running with scissors, and sometimes we do those things with full awareness for our own reasons.
I am often "sitting in on" other identities, in dreams and sometimes not-dreams, without even trying, and I am often "feeling energy move through me", which I think makes me a little more blasé about the topic--as some degree of these things occur with me natively (naturally) anyway.
I believe that most channeling is "information/energy" channeling and does not come with the 'skin of identity'. I once knew a woman who channeled who only sometimes even spoke. The planes in her face would change and the energy in the room would change, sometimes radically, and that was the point of it. The whole funky pay-a-zillion for Ramtha's-cosmic-insight seems hilarious to me. I know this was a big thing especially when Steinbrecher was publishing this book. I sometimes feel I am channeling, as if information is 'coming through me'. And sometimes when the Aeons are talking to me, I'm sorta translating and I feel it amounts to channeling even though to me it's more like 'subtle conversation I am recording'.
Back to Jane and Seth.
Seth's book "The Nature of Personal Reality" is IMO one of the most important spiritual contributions to several generations. It's a bit cerebral. There are smaller simpler books by them most people would like better.
Jane and Seth are part of the reason I'm a normal person exploring myself instead of drugged in a straightjacket somewhere. I found them at just the right time. My whole life followed the book I finally (reluctantly, I was very biased against channeling) agreed to read, me having ongoing 'experiences' and 'ideas' that the book would then explain and annotate shortly after. If you allow it, Seth books can be an 'experience' not just a read. I had no mental models or frameworks to handle my spontaneous experiences, I had no vocabulary to treat it as something sane, rational, and able to be integrated. They gave me that. I am still grateful.
In a world full of left-brainiacs who want to vomit over most woo-woo channeling, Seth and Jane singlehandedly redeemed the entire genre. They made a critical philosophical 'doorway' a lot more accessible to much of our culture. He was consistent; brilliant; insightful; humorous. He was not a guru by ego, only by result.
Seth's message, from start to finish, woven inextricably through everything he ever did for the public, was:
* You create your own reality-experience.
* What you perceive as reality is your belief systems manifested.
* "You get what you focus upon. There is no other main rule. [session 617]" (I have this, in calligraphy and frame, on my bedroom wall.)
* Your beliefs about reality are "about" it, they are not IT.
* The point of power is NOW.
* You have the ability to commune with yourself. Don't live in fear of 'hidden subconscious' stuff. Trust that if you truly inquire, anything you want to know about yourself is available.
Everything Seth did was about personal empowerment and an individual's ability to get to know themselves and intentionally shape their reality.
In short, everything that was Seth's message, is a total confirmation and support for inner guide / archetype work.
And as a matter of fact, Seth provided many exercises over time, several of which are incredibly like archetype work.
Another point:
Jane's mate, Rob, once felt he 'saw' Seth and painted a portrait of him.
ES says that portrait clearly looks like Jane's third house guide, hence obviously Seth was the false inner guide.
This has so many problems, where to begin?
1. The painting is by Rob, not Jane. SHE did not describe him that way; she didn't 'see' him. At least that I recall. Why on earth do we assume that "how Rob perceives" some entity is exactly what that entity looks like for Jane? Saturn looks different to me than to my friends. Why not any other totally nonphysical identity??
Is not one major lesson of the inner world that perception and reality are both totally subjective, that the same thing can be many things from many perspectives? The whole judgement on Seth, based on what he looks like "to Rob," compared to what he is allegedly "supposed to be for Jane," makes no sense at all to me as a result.
2. I respect ES's work and perspective but I do not yet know that an IG 'must' be 9th house match. But I am not taking this point seriously in the Seth debate -- as I do not care to dispute it because maybe he is right -- the above and following points are more relevant to this topic anyway.
3. Jane never said that Seth was her inner guide. Seth said that Jane was an aspect of him. ES seems to assume there is no other possible role that anything, anyone, could have to a human being. There's you, there's IG, and that's it. Everything else in existence, if it isn't you and it isn't IG, must be a false-IG! Come on already. I think that is taking the I-have-a-hammer way too far.
Steinbrecher accidentally almost created a religion here. Let's look at what we have. A method for talking to 'the divine/wise/guide/spirit/etc.' A description of what the good guy (IG-as-Messiah in this analogy) 'is'. A clear warning about how everything that is not the good guy, is bad. A specific model/map grafted onto it all of how-this-really-is. OK we have a few more bullet points before true religion is reached, I admit, but still, he was walking a pretty good road toward a doctrine there. At the least, it's a clear paradigm. And I wouldn't care because you have to believe SOMETHING based on experience, except for his seeming to think everyone else's experiences no matter how different, were to be judged by the framework of his own preference.
Seth said he was a teacher, he and Jane were connected, she asked, he answered. I'm having a hard time figuring out what part of this is inherently bad.
Next: ES suggests that if Seth hadn't been a 'false inner guide' that his information would have been (wait for it): "more spiritual but less clever."
Since Seth's entire message was always of individual reality and individual empowerment to change that, the 'not-spiritual-enough' accusation confuses me. If he had used flowery words and talked about scorpio and karma would he have been better accepted by Edwin? Is that spiritual? Inner Guide work is all about the exact same inner-world topics Seth addressed, amazingly. Which part was the 'not-spiritual-but-clever'? Was the fact that Seth basically dumped 99.99% of the mumbo jumbo BS out the window and discussed 'the nature of reality' as if it were a reasonable thing, was that too "clever but unspiritual" because it didn't have any spiritual terminology involved?
Was the fact that Seth did it without invoking astrology or tarot the real problem?
Or was it just that being 'a channeled' identity was the judgement? I mean for all the ranting about those in the channeling field, the aliens and the make-me-a-gurus and so on, none of that applies to Jane and Seth.
It is like taking someone who does doubleblind remote viewing, quietly, and then dissing them because there are these bozos on late night radio using that term and making worse than a mockery of it as its alleged 'representatives' to millions. Yes there are stupid people and wannabes but what does that have to do with Jane and Seth, who were close to the polar opposite of that? It's completely injust to judge them by behaviors, issues and circumstance they had nothing to do with. It's a hand-waving assignment of everything-obnoxious-about-new-age-channeling, glue-sticked onto Jane as if she bears the responsibility for everyone else.
Yep, she met him through Ouija (sorta indirectly or at least not as the initial meeting). Yep, she was a 'trance channeler'. Yep, the energy was very strong and the timing and volume (and accent) of the delivery quite odd, but there may be perfectly logical reasons for that; on its own I see no reason to judge that in any direction. Yes, she had other people in her living room a few times a week and sometimes, for some classes, Seth would talk with them on some topic or answer questions for various people. Did she charge big sums of money? No. She was a down to earth person. She had issues, everyone has issues, she had longstanding health problems, but she managed this despite that. That doesn't make Seth a bad guy because she failed to be perfect and Ascend Into The Light or whatever.
Maybe there is more to 'identity' and its merged-multiplicity than the simple "one person, one guide" model allows for.
Maybe ES was right about Seth being some "third house guide". Maybe, if so, "so what?" Personally if we were talking about identities, entities, which are part of us, I have a hard time grokking why part 9 is good but every other possible part is bad. Might this be because ES associated his experiences with part 9, so everything after that was expected to follow that model? Or is it that ES simply only looks for things that fit in the IG model, so anything else is wrong?
Sudden idea: 12 houses? Is there supposed to be a 'guide' in each house? What if they each have some specialization, and the 9th house is the IG specialization, but the others have... others?
Next: ES implied that Jane's illness that eventually killed her was something that Seth should have saved her from if he'd been her "real inner guide." This point has a lot of problems too.
First: he wasn't her IG. Nobody, not her or him or anybody else, ever claimed that he was her IG. So the repetition on "he was not her true IG!" as if this is some hugely important statement that officially damns them, is just ridiculous to me.
For the record let me state that my Four, my Consortium of 12, my child, my cat, my friends, and my dream characters, and my favorite deities, are not my IG. If this statement alone implies something bad about them I might as well take it right up top.
Second: she could have worked with her IG in addition to Seth. It's not like her work with Seth made work with any other source of energy, spirit, info, etc. impossible. If she did not choose to work with her IG, that is her life issue, not Seth's; she was not his puppet. He gave her all kinds of advice some of which she openly ignored.
(Actually, I feel that Jane was hugely experimental. A lot of her writing that is not official books is like a "varying % of her vs. Seth". Some people have been disillusioned by this, as if it put all of Seth's work, which they found otherwise stellar, suddenly in doubt for them. I however feel that this was part of her own learning and processing of identity.)
Perhaps Steinbrecher was right that working with her IG on her health might have saved her. But you know, I read an original, prior to publishing version of what became the book that went up to her death. Seth was trying to save her ass until the last minute, literally. (I bawled helplessly all day about it.) It was so pitiful. I think blaming Seth is really SO injust there.
Maybe--I don't know, so I'm open to this--maybe something about the energy of their work together actually did make her more vulnerable to something that affected her health. Mind you she had issues aside from him but maybe her work with him really did have an effect on her health. Maybe that kind of work does have a certain cost. Hell, even if it did something minor like deplete potassium and vitamin D for some reason (which even ordinary activities can do), if done consistently without compensating that could greatly gear someone toward low immunity and disease.
Maybe she could have done things, including IG work, to resolve it. But even if all of that is true, in what way does that make Seth inherently bad, false, distractive, dangerous, or whatever? EVERYTHING is a trade-off of energy. Everything, and everybody. The Private Oracle told me that but I believe it for my own reasons. My Aeons, my Four, the private oracle, inner guide, everything, everyone, every "interaction" is an energy trade of some kind.
Learning what identities are best suited for what, and learning what it "costs" us for that and whether we choose that, seems like the task of the century.
Maybe Jane was unbalanced because she had so much 3rd-house-guide energy and so little every-other-house-guide energy. I imagine there are some risks to everything. Some people die doing daring skiing, or from eating too much of one thing and not enough of another. If that contributed to her death, that sucks, but I don't think it is appropriate to blame Seth for it. If she did not choose to save herself, not via Seth's advice and not via working with other entities more geared to direct-healing, if for whatever reason her soul chose to check out of this frequency, then you know -- that is her choice.
Sometimes the most exceptional people in some areas are the most torqued in some other. Suggesting that she might not have died if he'd been different seems unfair; with this logic, anybody doing IG meditations should have eternal life, right? So where is Edwin? Dead. Granted he was 71 when he died in 2002, but if I extend his logic, nothing besides old age at 115+ should kill someone with the proper inner guide relationship -- at least, as he is projecting it (unfairly in my mind) toward Jane and Seth in this instance.
I'm not arguing ES's claim that Seth (a) was not Jane's "true inner guide" or that (b) was Jane's "third house guide". I don't think the former is even relevant as that was not what she was questing for anyway. And I think the latter, even if true, simply makes the topic of "sources of information" even more interesting to me. I don't consider Seth some kind of negative entity of darkness. I have a huge respect and appreciation and gratitude for him. So if he is representative of "third house guides", which so-far have been relegated solely to the dismissive category as "false inner guides" (in other words not-a-9th-house-guide), then that doesn't make me think, "Oooh, bad, avoid that!" -- instead, it makes me want to understand more about that kind of identity. So it's not IG... I get that. Not everything in my internal universe has to be IG. My IG rocks and is unique... nobody else could be her anyway! That doesn't mean they don't have value for whatever they are.
I think that Edwin Steinbrecher's model for Inner Guide as used in archetype work is very cool and insightful. I think his mapping all this with tarot and astrology as the most (obvious and powerful) archetypes is also very cool and insightful. I think he was a smart guy with a questing mind and I respect him a lot.
But I think there are many more questions to be answered in this work and certainly his groundbreaking, very cool book is the alpha, not the omega. Like:
* What else can IG do, besides bring us archetypes, Aeons (or according to ES, talk to the dead)? I have the gut feeling there is a lot of powerful potential there that we have never even thought to ask about, have not even considered.
* Do the energy relationships in us manifest in our body too? Are there certain 'mappings' of the internal world that would do better for health-related work?
* If IG is a 9th-house guide, and 3rd-house guides are known and recognizeable for different qualities (of behavior not just appearance), is it possible that all one's houses have guides?
* If all one's astro houses have an equivalent 'guide' in the archetypal realm for the asking, is it possible they each have a specialized function/area that we have not explored yet?
* Is it possible that often the 3rd-house guide comes forward for a good reason, like maybe in our culture that's a part of ourself we actually tend to lean toward more? (Eg more logical and verbally communicative.)
* What other 'maps of the internal universe' besides astrology and tarot can be utilized in an archetype model? How about:
- the i ching?
- The Tree of Life?
- Feng Shui?
- Power-animals?
- What about colors, numbers, and other elements of "correspondence" that qabala also uses?
- (What about Enochian entities? I'm not trying it...)
- What about 'elementals'?
- What about body-parts -- what role does my liver really have on a larger scale?
- What about astronomy, and not just the major planets but other things too (major moons in the system, rings, the galaxy, the asteroid belt)?
- What about the zillion heirarchical angelic troops delineated (ad nauseum) in The Urantia Book?
I'll head into part 2 in awhile, might take a reading break for a few days.
PJ
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