“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I try to strongly state the pristine uniqueness of the individual. I also say that there are no limitations to the self. The two statements can appear to be contradictory. When you are a child, your sense of identity does not include old age in usual experience. When you are an old person, you do not identify yourself as a child. Your sense of identity, then, changes physically through the years. In a way it seems that you add on to yourself through experience, becoming “more than you were before.” You move in and out of probable selfhoods, while at the same time — usually with the greatest of ease — you maintain an identity of yourself. The mosaics of consciousness are brilliant to behold.

The infant sees mental images before birth, before the eyes are open. Your memory, it seems, is your own — yet I have told you that you have a history of other existences. You remember other faces, even though the mind you call the conscious one may not recognize the images from that deep inner memory. It must often clothe them in fantasy. You are yourself. Your self is secure in its own identity, unique in its characteristics, meeting life and the seasons in a way that has never happened before, and will never happen again — yet still you are a unique version of your greater self. You share in certain overall patterns that are in themselves original.

Your painting was meant to bring out from the recesses of your being the accumulation of your knowledge in the form of images — not of people you might meet now on the street, but portraits of the residents of the mind. The residents of the mind are very real. In a certain fashion, they are your parents more than your parents were, and when you express their realities, they are also expressing yours. All time is simultaneous. Only the illusion of time on each of your parts keeps you from greeting each other. To some extent, when you paint such portraits you are forming psychic bridges between yourself and those other selves: Your own identity as yourself grows.

Dictation: If you cannot trust your private self, then you will not trust yourself in your relationships with others or in society.

If you do not trust your private self, you will be afraid of power, for you will fear that you are bound to misuse it. You may then purposefully (leaning forward, quietly emphatic but with some amusement) put yourself in a position of weakness, while all of the time claiming that you seek influence. Not understanding yourself, you will be in a quandary, and the mechanics of experience will appear mysterious and capricious.