“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

And good evening, Ruburt, my nervous pigeon. Oh, how the ego fights. It is so sure of its dominance in all matters. Woe to anyone who gives a personality knowledge in the manner in which I am giving you knowledge. Oh, how the ego rises up in arms.

Ruburt has been complaining with loud inner wails because he has been sleeping later in the mornings, and hasn’t put in his full work time this week. And of course I am to blame. I am most certainly not to blame. I certainly will not be the family whipping boy. It is true that I have disrupted your schedule to some degree, but not after all in any great manner. How could you be spending the same amount of time any more profitably? The truth is, that the lazy ego finds excuses where it may.

The very fact that you breathe and dream and perform countless other activities without any aid from the conscious ego should of itself convince even the most stubborn scientific skull that more is involved than science is willing to admit. The idea of the subconscious mind is merely a grudging, hedging, partial admission that man is more than the conscious ego, more than the sum of his parts, and more than a mechanism.

The emotions belong to the personality, that is to the present personality, and are strongly connected both to the conscious ego and to the inner self, which is so often ignored. This is the rather difficult part for me to explain, I’m afraid. I’m not sure how to go about making this clear.

If you will think (I hope) for simplicity’s sake of the whole self as it exists on your plane with its physical body, conscious ego and inner self as one field unit, which is also part of the larger or more complete entity as one field unit within another, then perhaps it will not be too much for you to imagine the connection, or one of the connections, between the entity field and the whole-self field, which is on your plane as being the inner senses—that is, the inner senses are one of the connectives between these two fields.

The emotions, while connected to the ego strongly, nevertheless also belong to what we have been pleased to call the subconscious. But because they are so intertwined with the inner life they are also common to both the ego and the so-called subconscious.

They are more than prehistoric. They are in some respects evolutionary developments, being the end portions of the inner senses transformed to some degree, to permit manipulation of camouflage pattern. Before the conscious ego evolved, emotion served well as necessary stimuli to action in the camouflage environment. I am trying to put over the thought here in one way or another that as the inner senses come more and more within the field of the whole self on your plane, they take on its characteristics while yet retaining within themselves their own characteristics.

What you are pleased to call the subconscious represents merely the part of the inner senses, or of the inner self, that even your society can no longer ignore. And this is indeed only the surface. Here you find of course the repository for personal memories, and not of personal egobound conscious memories either, but also of psychological experiences that the ego itself prefers to forget.

The present personality cannot travel to the complete entity, again because of these very real laws; that is, while caught in or under the influence of the field of your plane, the personality cannot travel to the entity. The personality can and should be aware of the whole self of which it is a part, and that part of the whole self which the ego ignores, is the one part which can enter into the field influence of the entity, though it cannot travel to the entity itself.

Death is the personality’s release from the physical plane, or we will use the term “the physical field,” and that is all. To the ego this is a frightening future in prospect. To the ego, even sleep seems a slap in the face. Recognition in physical life of the whole self would do much to negate this death fear, since there are rather pleasant psychological experiences which are akin to the experience of death, and which would prepare the personality for this eventuality.