“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The ego is the tool by which the hidden self manipulates in the physical universe. In your case, it enables you to focus your artistic ability along lines necessary to make it effective on your plane. However, when the ego becomes involved with fears, it ceases to be an effective tool and becomes instead a hammer hitting you incessantly over the head. …

When the ego becomes overly concerned, it becomes overly conditioned to negative responses. The creative energies build up their thickly-dimensioned pseudo-realities of pain. For a certain amount of time, according to your condition, they automatically create the patterns of fear that belong to the ego.

These fears do not belong to what you think of as the subconscious. Then these materializations of panic and pain play about the physical body, projected by the ego, and steal the powers of the subconscious mind from their natural constructive tasks.… In other words, the ego becomes a tool to disrupt rather than to create.

The viruses and infections were, of course, present. They always are. They are themselves fragments, struggling small fragments, without intention of harm. You have general immunity, believe it or not, to all such viruses. Ideally, you can inhabit a plane with them without fear. It is only when you give tacit agreement that harm is inflicted. To some degree, household pets are dependent upon your psychic strength. They have their own, it is true, but, unknowingly, you reinforce their energy and health.

At times, the ego can hold you in a tight vice, which the dissociation breaks. This is what happened after your exercises. You have been doing very well … in allowing yourself psychic freedom. However, conscious fears cause the ego to tighten its grasp, and some effects of this nature were starting up. This is why I suggested the exercises at this time.

The fact that the fearful ego was beginning to tighten explains your reaction to the exercises. The ego can build up around the inner self like a glacier, and the exercises help melt it away. Even the prickles in your neck are like tiny picks chipping away at icy fears. … You were released so quickly as a result of the exercises that you didn’t know what had happened.…

If, for example, our tree bark grew fearful of stormy weather and began to harden itself against the elements, in a well-meaning but distorted protective spirit, then the tree would die. This is what the ego does when it reacts too violently to purely physical data. As a result, it stiffens, and then you have, my well-meaning friend, the cold detachment with which you at one time faced the world.

The inner tree can continue to grow because the bark is resilient. It bends with the wind. It does not bend when there is no wind, nor does it stiffen, stopping the flow of sap to the treetop for fear that the dumb tree, not knowing what it was up to, would bump its head against the sky.