“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Condensed time is the time felt by the entity, or experienced by the entity, while any of its given personalities “live” (and you had better put that in quotes) on a plane of physical materializations. To go into this a bit further, many men have said that life was a dream. They were true to the facts in one strong regard, and yet far afield as far as the main issue is concerned.

Individual life, or the life of the present individual, could be legitimately compared to the dream of an entity. While the individual suffers and enjoys his given number of years, these years are but a flash to the entity. The entity is concerned with these years in the same manner that you are concerned with your dreams. As you give inner purpose and organization to your dreams, and as you obtain insight and satisfaction from your dreams though they involve only a part of your life, so the entity to some extent directs and gives purpose and organization to his personalities during their existence. And so does the entity obtain insights and satisfactions from his existing personalities, although no one takes up all of his own attentions.

And as your dreams originate with you, rise from you, attain a seeming independence and have their ending with you, so do an entity’s personalities arise from him, attain various degrees of independence, and return to him while never leaving him for an instant.

You are familiar through your reading with so-called secondary personalities. There have been cases of individuals with three separate personalities. Now this idea comes close to the relationship of the entity to its personalities. They are independent to varying degrees, and they operate on various planes for purposes of overall fulfillment and development.

To a lesser degree, you function along these lines in varying roles when you exist simultaneously as a member of a family, a member of a community, a nation, and as an artist or a writer. As you attempt to use your abilities so does the entity attempt to use his abilities, and he organizes his various personalities and to some extent directs their activities while still allowing them what you would call free will.

There exists infinities of diversity and opportunity for the personalities, and this diversity is given to it, to it meaning the personality, by the entity. Your own dreams are fragments, even as in a much larger sense you are fragments of your entity. An unrecognized unity and organization lies within all of your dreams, beneath their diversity. And your dreams, while part of you, actually exist apart. That is, you have given them a certain independence. This is difficult to explain clearly, and may be rather difficult for you to swallow whole. I hope you don’t choke.

However, as I have said there is great similarity between your relationship to your dreams, and to the entity’s relationship to his personality. What I did not make plain was that your dreams are part of a plane, and exist on it as you exist on your plane.

That dream world has its own reality, its own time, which is different from your concept of time, and its own inner organization. As the entity is only partially concerned with its personalities after setting them into motion, so you are unconcerned with this dream world which you have set into motion. But it exists.

To a different degree it is filled with conscious semipersonalities. I call them semipersonalities merely to point out that they are not as developed as you are, as you are not as developed as your entity is. Nevertheless, that dream world experiences continuity. It is not aware of any break while, for example, you are sleeping. It does not know you sleep or wake. It merely exists to a fairly vivid degree while you sleep, and it sleeps but does not die while you are awake.

The entity itself does not have to keep constant check on its personalities, because in each personality there is an inner self-conscious part that knows its origin. This part, for now, I will call the self-conscious beyond the subconscious. The breather and the dreamer are not so automatically controlled as it would seem. I have mentioned before that some part of you knows exactly how much oxygen the lungs breathe, and how much energy it takes to pace a floor, and this is the part of you of which I spoke. It is the part, and the self-conscious part, that receives all inner data.

The part that translates inner data sifts it down through the subconscious, which is a barrier and also a threshold to the present personality as it operates on the camouflage plane. I have mentioned many times how vitality changes as it approaches and forms various planes. I have said that the topmost part of the subconscious contains personal memories. That beneath these are racial memories and so forth. Things are simply not layered in the way I speak of them. But continuing with the necessary analogy, on the other side of (or beneath to you) the racial memories, you no longer exist within your plane, and look out upon another with the face of this other self-conscious part of you. This part receives inner data, is in contact with the entity, to some greater degree than you are in contact with your dreams, and actually directs all the important functions that you think are either automatically controlled, or unconsciously controlled.

There is also a corresponding, but lesser, self-consciousness that connects your present personalities with the dream world, which is aware of its origin and communicates data from you to it. Again you are no more aware of your dream creations, and no less aware than your entity is of you, but in the last analysis you are aware and connected with your entity through this self-conscious part of you that faces another plane.