“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause.) In one way or another, that inner information had to connect each consciousness on the face of the planet. Earthly creatures must be able to react in a moment, yet the inner mechanisms that made such reactions possible were based upon calculations that could not be consciously kept in mind. In your time scheme, for example, you could never move as quickly as you do if you had to consciously work all the muscles involved in motion—or in speech, or in any such bodily performance. You certainly could not communicate on such a physical level if you first had to be aware of all of speech’s mechanisms, working them consciously before a word was uttered. Yet you had to have that kind of knowledge, and you had to have it in a way that did not intrude upon your conscious thoughts.

Basically there are no real divisions to the self, but for the sake of explanation we must speak of them in those terms. First of all you had the inner self, the creative dreaming self—composed, again, of units of consciousness, awareized energy that forms your identity, and that formed the identities of the earliest earth inhabitants. These inner selves formed their own dream bodies about them, as previously explained, but the dream bodies did not have to have physical reactions. They were free of gravity and space, and of time.

(Pause at 9:23.) As the body became physical, however, the inner self formed the body consciousness so that the physical body became more aware of itself, of the environment, and of its relationship within the environment. Before this could happen, though, the body consciousness was taught to become aware of its own inner environment. The body was lovingly formed from EE units through all the stages to atoms, cells, organs, and so forth. The body’s pattern came from the inner self, as all of the units of consciousness involved in this venture together formed this fabric of environment and creatures, each suited to the other.

So far in our discussion, then, we have an inner self, dwelling primarily in a mental or psychic dimension, dreaming itself into physical form, and finally forming a body consciousness. To that body consciousness the inner self gives “its own body of physical knowledge,” the vast reservoir of physical achievement that it has triumphantly produced. (Pause.) The body consciousness is not “unconscious,” but for working purposes in your terms, [the body] possesses its own system of consciousness that to some extent, now (underlined), is separated from what you think of as your own normal consciousness. The body’s consciousness is hardly to be considered less than your own, or as inferior to that of your inner self, since it represents knowledge from the inner self, and is a part of the inner self’s own consciousness—the part delegated to the body.

(Pause, one of many in here.) Thus far in our discussion, we still have only an inner self and a body consciousness. As the body consciousness developed itself, perfected its organization, the inner self and the body consciousness together performed a kind of psychological double-entendre.

(Pause at 9:42.) Give us a moment…. The best analogy I can think of is that up to that time the self was like a psychological rubber band, snapping inward and outward with great force and vitality, but without any kind of rigid-enough psychological framework to maintain a physical stance. The inner self still related to dream reality, while the body’s orientation and the body consciousness attained, as was intended, a great sense of physical adventure, curiosity, speculation, wonder—and so once again the inner self put a portion of its consciousness in a different parcel, so to speak. As once it had formed the body consciousness, now it formed a physically attuned consciousness, a self whose desires and intents would be oriented in a way that, alone, the inner self could not be.

(All with emphatic rhythm:) The inner self was too aware of its own multidimensionality, so in your terms it gave psychological birth to itself through the body in space and time. It knew itself as a physical creature. That portion of the self is the portion you recognize as your usual conscious self, alive within the scheme of seasons, aware within the designs of time, caught transfixed in moments of brilliant awareness, with civilizations that seem to come and go. That is the self that is alert in the dear preciseness of the moments, whose physical senses are bound to light and darkness, sound and touch. That is the self that lives the life of the body.

It is the self that looks outward. It is the self that you call egotistically aware. The inner self became what I refer to as the inner ego. It looks into that inner reality, that psychic dimension of awareness from which both your own consciousness and your body consciousness emerged.

You are one self, then, but for operating purposes we will say that you have three parts: the inner self or inner ego, the body consciousness, and the consciousness that you know.

(Long pause at 9:57.) Give us a moment…. To one extent or another, these three systems of consciousness operate in one way or another in all of the species, and in all particles, in the physical universe. In your terms, this means that the proportions of the three systems might vary, but they are always in operation, whether we are speaking of a man or a woman, a rock or a fly, a star or an atom. The inner self represents your prime identity, the self you really are.