“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The bakery across the street from Throckmorton’s shop was run by a man called Ragan. R-a-g-a-n. He had a wife, five children, and three children who died in their early years. He was a distant cousin of Throckmorton’s, of Irish descent.

The girl Anna married the other younger brother of Dick’s, who also became prosperous in later years. The head of the family is also someone with whom you are acquainted, being in this life the husband of your present mother’s niece. That English existence had much to do with your family and its relationships in this life. New challenges were set for the personalities.

The personality when it leaves your plane for good will have developed its potentials as far as it possibly can. This does not mean that all personalities who have left your plane are at the same level. Since their potential has individual variety, it depends a good deal upon the personality’s ability to utilize energy as a unit, or to transform energy into unit patterns.

I have only begun to go into this, but this matter is extremely important. Everyone who has left your plane has developed as far as he can on your plane. But as in your life certain environments tend to encourage some people in the realization of their talents, and seem to hinder others in the development of their peculiar talents, so some personalities expand in their capabilities on your plane; and some who do rather poorly on your plane expand surprisingly on other planes.

Therefore, with such an unnatural division it seems to man that he does not know himself. He says “I breathe, but who breathes, since consciously I cannot tell myself to breathe or not to breathe?” He says “I dream, but who dreams? I cannot tell myself to dream or not to dream.” He cuts himself in half, then wonders why he is not whole. Even in my own lifetimes on your plane I sensed this basic contradiction. Man has consistently admitted to the evidence only those things he could see, smell, touch or hear, and in so doing he could only appreciate half of himself. And when I say half of himself I exaggerate. He is aware of only a third of himself, because two-thirds of himself exists in that realm to which he will not admit.

If man does not know who breathes within him, and if man does not know who dreams within him, it is not because there is one who acts in the physical world and one completely separate who dreams and breathes. It is because he has buried the part of himself which breathes and dreams. If these functions seem so automatic as to be performed by someone completely divorced from himself, it is because he has done the divorcing. This is not the case on all planes. It is not even the case on planes that you might consider lower than your own, nor is it the case with some portions of life that you consider beneath you on your own plane.

The part of you who dreams is the “I” as much as the part of you that operates in any other manner. The part of you who dreams is the part of you who breathes. And this part is certainly as legitimate and actually more necessary to you as a whole unit, as far as survival on your physical plane is concerned, than the part that also plays bridge or Scrabble. It would seem ludicrous to suppose that such a vital matter as breathing would be left to a subordinate and almost completely divorced poor-relative sort of a lesser personality.

Because you know that somehow you breathe, without consciously being aware of the actual mechanics being involved, you are forced despite your inclinations to admit that you do do your own breathing. When you cross a room you are forced to admit that you have caused yourself to cross the room, even though consciously you have no idea of willing the muscles to move or of stimulating one muscle or another; and yet even there, though you admit these things, you do not believe them. In your quiet unguarded moments you still say who breathes, who dreams, and even who moves? How much easier it would be to admit freely and wholeheartedly the simple fact that you are not consciously aware of important vital parts of yourself, and that you are more than you know you are.