“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The entire session ran three hours, and most of it was devoted to the ego and the subconscious and to their relationship to health and illness. While Rob’s back was vastly improved since Seth’s reincarnational sessions for him, he still had some bad days now and then. We’d been in the habit of blaming difficulties on the subconscious.

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.

Your own subconscious is the fountain of your individuality and personality; from it springs your talent. When the ego becomes too concerned with daily matters, with worry, then it becomes far less effective. The freely working subconscious — or the inner you — is completely capable of taking care of all practical considerations and will use the ego as a tool to do so.

Dissociation puts the power back where it belongs. Daily methods of dissociation are extremely practical. … You will notice within a few weeks’ time an added energy. So-called impulses on your part are often blocked because you do not consider them practical. But the subconscious knows its own meat and its own sauce and the best means for its nourishment.

Begin the yoga exercises and follow them faithfully. Your few experiments with autosuggestion upon falling asleep have been ego-bound. Think of this in terms of muscle-bound, and you will see what I mean. Be in a drowsy state and suggest, Ruburt, suggest — suggest, Joseph. Do not attempt to bully or command the subconscious. Joseph, if you are uncomfortable, I suggest you move to your sturdy old rocker.

Incidentally, while we are on the subject, often when you thought you were dealing with a matter or a person in a dissociated manner, you were instead exhibiting a cold, conscious detatchment. This is a pose of the ego and is not to be confused with the lithe subconscious detachment which is actually warm, flexible and expansive.

But when I read the session, I thought of Rob sitting there, listening to what I thought of as criticism, while his wife paced the room “telling him off” in another voice and supposedly for another, invisible personality. “I worry that it’s just a psychological trick,” I said. “I mean, suppose that’s really what I think, subconsciously — the idea that your ego is too rigid at times and closes you off. So I simply adopt another personality to tell you so. Then I wouldn’t be responsible and you couldn’t talk back.”