“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Many individuals imagine the soul to be an immortalized ego, forgetting that the ego as you know it is only a small portion of the self; so this section of the personality is simply projected onward, ad infinitum, so to speak. Because the dimensions of your reality are so little understood, your concepts are bound to be limited. In considering “immortality,” mankind seems to hope for further egotistical development, and yet he objects to the idea that such development might involve change. He says through his religions that he has a soul indeed, without even asking what a soul is, and often he seems to regard it, again, as an object in his possession.

Now personality, even as you know it, constantly changes, and not always in ways that are anticipated — most often, in fact, in unpredictable ways. You insist upon focusing your attention upon the similarities that are woven through your own behavior; and upon these you build a theory that the self follows a pattern that you, instead, have transposed upon it. And the transposed pattern prevents you from seeing the self as it really is. Therefore, you also project this distorted viewpoint upon your conception of the reality of the soul. You think of the soul, therefore, in the light of erroneous conceptions that you hold regarding even the nature of your mortal selves.

You can find out what the soul is now, therefore. It is not something waiting for you at your death, nor is it something you must save or redeem, and it is also something that you cannot lose. The term, “to lose or save your soul”, has been grossly misinterpreted and distorted, for it is the part of you that is indeed indestructible. We will go into this particular matter in a portion of the book dealing with religion and the god concept.

(9:42.) Your soul therefore — the soul that you are — the soul that you are part of — that soul is a far more creative and miraculous phenomenon than you previously supposed. And when this is not clearly understood, and when the concept is watered down for simplicity’s sake, as mentioned earlier, then the intense vitality of the soul can never be understood. Your soul, therefore, possesses the wisdom, information, and knowledge that is part of the experience of all these other personalities; and you have within yourselves access to this information, but only if you realize the true nature of your reality. Let me emphasize again that these personalities exist independently within and are a part of the soul, and each of them are free to create and develop.

Now: This discussion is not meant to be an esoteric presentation with little practical meaning in your daily lives. The fact is that while you hold limited concepts of your own reality, then you cannot practically take advantage of many abilities that are your own; and while you have a limited concept of the soul, then to some extent you cut yourself off from the source of your own being and creativity.

What often happens is that your conception of reality is so limited that you take fright whenever you perceive any experience that does not fit into your conception. Now I am not speaking merely of abilities loosely called “extrasensory perception.” These experiences seem extraordinary to you only because you have for so long denied the existence of any perception that did not come through the physical senses.

So-called extrasensory perception gives you but a crude and distorted idea of the basic ways in which the inner self receives information, but the concepts built around extrasensory perception are at least nearer the truth, and as such represent an improvement over the idea that all perception is basically physical.