“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Many do. You give probable selves a foundation and history and identity, and without your creation of them they would not exist. Would you, then, deny them reality in order to save them from any pain? Now, your headache can vanish. All existence is vulnerable … to the possibilities and probabilities of creation that dwell deeply with it. Even when you thrust a pain apart from yourself and give it as a heritage to a fragment personality, you give it also your creative power and your hopes. You do not set these personalities adrift without hope or potential.

Again, these portions of the self exist in each reincarnation. In the materialization of personality through various reincarnations only the ego and layers of personal subconscious adapt new characteristics. Other portions retain their experience, identity, and knowledge. The ego, in fact, receives much of its stability because of this retention. Were it not for experiences in other lives on the part of deeper layers of the self, the ego would find it almost impossible to relate to other individuals, and the cohesive nature of society would not exist.

You may not be able to make sense from what appears to be a chaotic jungle of disconnected images and actions. The main reason for your confusion is the inability of an egotistical identity to perceive order that is not based upon continuity of moments. The order within the probable system is based upon something that could be compared to subjective associations or intuitive flashes of insight — experiences that can combine ingredients that could appear to the ego as disconnected. Here they are combined into whole integrated patterns of action.

The dreams you will have and have had in shared experience are root dreams. They serve as a method of maintaining inner identity and communication. Projections can also occur from these — that is, you may, for example, project into the life of the doctor. (I am using you and the doctor as an example. Art, you see, is also closely connected with healing. The projections of which I spoke happen occasionally and spontaneously on both of your parts.)

I have told you that the ego is self-conscious action that attempts to set itself apart from action and to consider action as an object. Now this altered ego retains its highly specialized self-consciousness, and yet it can now experience itself as an identity within and as a part of action.

The next step is taken when identity is able to include within itself the intimate knowledge of all incarnations. Yet in this state, the independence of the various reincarnated selves is not diminished. Each of these steps of consciousness involve identity with the inner recognition of its unity with All That Is.

As each separate identity then seeks to know and experience its other portions, then All That Is learns Who and What It Is. Action never ceases its exploration of itself. All That Is can never know itself completely, since action must always act and each action creates a new unknown. Action must travel through itself from every conceivable point, and yet the journey, being itself action, will create new paths.

In the dream state, the portions of the larger ‘structure’ sometimes communicate in highly codified symbols. It would be highly improbable that you could decipher many of these now. There is a feedback system that operates, and yet you must understand that these other identities are fully independent and individual. They exist in codified psychological structures within your personality, as you do in theirs.

This multi-dimensional personality or identity is the psychological structure with which we will be concerned in many sessions. The term includes probable selves, reincarnated selves and selves more developed than the self that you know. These make up the basic identity of the whole self. All portions are independent.