“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At that time old challenges had been met and old debts had been paid, to a large degree. I will not make this evening’s session too long because of last evening’s unscheduled one. However as you have probably supposed by now, change of sex and race is the usual as far as continuing existences on your plane are concerned.

Lack of this last factor can cause a personality to be reborn more times on your plane than would be necessary if only the role requirement operated. This requirement for fullest use of capabilities has nothing to do with opportunity in the social sense, although of course the particular social framework will have much to do with the particular development of certain abilities.

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.

This talent for using energy to form unit patterns is elemental, not only on your plane but in all other planes. It involves drawing upon the basic vitality of the universe in using the inner senses, and actually pulling to oneself more and more of this underlaying vitality. Lest this suggest images of graspy potbellied souls, gluttonously grabbing the stuff of the universe for themselves out of the mouths of the less ambitious, let me hasten to inform you that such is not the case.

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.

It is not in any manner inevitable or a law of the universe. Far from it. For some reason mankind as a species on your plane has become much more attached to its camouflage patterns than most other kinds of consciousness. And with some important exceptions, all types of consciousness do have their peculiar camouflage patterns to which they more or less adhere.

It is on your part more than anything else, a simple refusal to admit into existence anything that is not a camouflage pattern. Camouflage patterns are of course, with again some exceptions, essentials on any plane, since each type represents the actual form of the plane and the various characteristics within it. Nevertheless it is possible, and actually much more efficient and simple, to accept this fact and also realize and admit the inner vitality behind the camouflage.

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.

He becomes trapped by his own artificially-divided self. He looks for gods, anything at all, to explain perfectly natural functions that belong to him. This beautifully absolves him in his own eyes from all responsibility, but it does not. I have been speaking here only, if you will believe it, of personalities in their particular lives as they operate on your plane, and I have much to say.

You must remember, and this is I’m afraid a sideline: but I must communicate this data to you by words which must necessarily be strung out in order, end to end, when now to me there is no such necessity, and I will go into this further. As I began to say, I have been speaking of your plane and the personalities upon it. Now I will go into this further, into the entities involved.

It is true that as a rule you are not aware of your whole entity, which as a rule does not reside within your boundaries. But there is no reason why you must be blind to the whole self of your present personality, which is part of your entity, and which can be glimpsed on your plane in terms of the breathing and dreaming self of which I have spoken.

Outer physical time is a complete camouflage, unnecessary basically on your plane; but you have made it seem necessary because of your refusal to admit the inner self as part of your whole personality, and therefore you have not been able to utilize psychological time to its fullest advantage on your plane. Psychological time as I have said is a natural pathway, part of an inner sense, that was meant as an easy access from the inner to the outer world and back again. You do not use it as such.