“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.

When I speak of the whole self I am of course referring to the personality as it exists in its entirety, having at its command use of both the inner and outer senses. That is, I speak of the doer, the mover, the breather and the dreamer as all belonging to one whole self.

This designation does not include the entity as a whole, however. The personality does have access to the entity, but the personality does not contain the entity. In other words the whole self as it exists on your plane does not contain the entity, although communication between the entity and the whole self can and does take place by means of the inner senses.

Again, at best you get something like a mirror image which must be deciphered. This is rather difficult to get across to you. However, data received by the inner senses will have its own discernible impact upon the personality receiving it, and this impact is as strong as any impact caused by camouflage stimuli.

Again, the impressions received by the inner senses are actually concrete in a way that you do not yet understand. This data also has physical effects upon the brain. In the same manner that impressions received from outside stimuli affect the brain, they make their impression upon it. They change the personality as any experience changes a personality. To insist upon evidence in terms of outside sensual data is as ridiculous a notion as to expect a camera to play music.

Almost everyone is familiar with something else, however, and that is the psychological experience which may have no observable physical effect, and yet can change a personality to a large degree. Now the change in the personality may have secondary physical effects. The personality may act in certain ways in the physical world as a result of a psychological experience. But these physical effects are secondary to the experience, and the experience of itself makes no physical effect upon the material world. Any such effects are made after the experience by the personality involved.

A death in a family, for example, is a physical occurrence. Various members of the family will react differently, as you know. The psychological experience will be intensely diversified, personal, unpredictable as far as each family member is concerned. You cannot observe this actual psychological experience with the outer senses. Even you yourself cannot see, smell, touch that inner experience. You cannot hold it in both hands and look it over. You cannot observe it in any objective manner, as you can observe a pencil on a table, yet it would be foolish to say that this psychological experience did not exist. It is too vivid to ignore, and oftentimes the personality is almost divorced from action because of this experience that is psychological, that cannot be observed with instruments, or even by the person involved.

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.

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.

This subconscious is another link or connective between the two fields of which we have spoken, and again, as it enters your plane it takes on the characteristics of your plane. That is why you find personal memories at the outermost portion, but the subconscious also reaches to the entity itself.

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.

It is only the sense of duality, of which we have spoken, that makes death appear as such a dreadful thing. Once the personality realizes that even in life on your plane he is not always bound by physical data, and that even in physical life the most real portion of him is independent of physical matter, and in a personal way, then he will not fear death as a personal ending.