“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now because your conscious mind, as you think of it, is not aware of these activities, you do not identify with this inner portion of yourselves. You prefer to identify with the part of you who watches television or cooks or works — the part you think knows what it is doing. But this seemingly unconscious portion of yourself is far more knowledgeable, and upon its smooth functioning your entire physical existence depends.

I call this seemingly unconscious the “inner ego,” for it directs inner activities. It correlates information that is perceived not through the physical senses, but through other inner channels. It is the inner perceiver of reality that exists beyond the three-dimensional. It carries within it the memory of each of your past existences. It looks into subjective dimensions that are literally infinite, and from these subjective dimensions all objective realities flow. (Long pause.)

You cannot understand yourselves, and you cannot accept my independent existence, until you rid yourself of the notion that personality is a “here and now” attribute of consciousness. Now some of the things that I may say about physical reality in this book may startle you, but remember that I am viewing it from an entirely different standpoint.

I hope, quite frankly, to do far more than this. I hope to take you on a tour through the levels of reality that are available to you, and to guide you on a journey through the dimensions of your own psychological structure — to open up whole areas of your own consciousness of which you have been relatively unaware. I hope, therefore, not only to explain the multidimensional aspects of personality, but to give each reader some glimpse of that greater identity that is his own.

The self that you know is but one fragment of your entire identity. These fragment selves are not strung together, however, like beads of a string. They are more like the various skins of an onion, or segments of an orange, all connected through the one vitality and growing out into various realities while springing from the same source.

I am not comparing personality to an orange or an onion, but I want to emphasize that as these things grow from within outward, so does each fragment of the entire self. You observe the outside aspect of objects. Your physical senses permit you to perceive the exterior forms to which you then react, but your physical senses to some extent force you to perceive reality in this manner, and the inside vitality within matter and form is not so apparent.

I can tell you, for example, that there is consciousness even within a nail, but few of my readers will take me seriously enough to stop in midsentence, and say good morning or good afternoon to the nearest nail they can find, stuck in a piece of wood.

For convenience’s sake, you close out the multitudinous inner communications that leap between the tiniest parts of your flesh, yet even as physical creatures, you are to some extent a portion of other consciousnesses. There are no limitations to the self. There are no limitations to its potentials. (Pause.) You can adopt artificial limitations through your own ignorance, however. You can identify, for example, with your outer ego alone, and cut yourself off from abilities that are a part of you. You can deny, but you cannot change, the facts. The personality is multidimensional, even though many people hide their heads, figuratively speaking, in the sand of three-dimensional existence and pretend there is nothing more.

We will have more to say concerning this point, but for now it is enough to realize that your sense of identity and continuity is not dependent upon the ego.

Now at times I will be using the term “camouflage,” referring to the physical world to which the outer ego relates, for physical form is one of the camouflages that reality adopts. The camouflage is real, and yet there is a much greater reality within it — the vitality that gave it form. Your physical senses then allow you to perceive this camouflage, for they are attuned to it in a highly specialized manner. But to sense the reality within the form requires a different sort of attention, and more delicate manipulations than the physical senses provide.

The ego is a jealous god, and it wants its interests served. It does not want to admit the reality of any dimensions except those within which it feels comfortable and can understand. It was meant to be an aid but it has been allowed to become a tyrant. Even so, it is much more resilient and eager to learn than is generally supposed. It is not natively as rigid as it seems. Its curiosity can be of great value.