“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We are speaking of course here of the ordinary physical environment. The chemical, biological, electrical and psychic functions of the self are directly connected to the physical universe as a whole. Theoretically the influence of a particular given self is endless, and not only in so far as your own physical camouflage time universe is concerned. The influence of any given self reaches also into realities that are not bounded by space and time.

This is why I have mentioned earlier that the individual was supremely important. Yet the self limits itself through boundaries that are arbitrary and erected through fear, and also through habit that originally had its source in the necessity for physical survival. Physical survival does not demand these habits any longer, and they remain as shackles. You should know by now that individual thought does not remain within the boundary of the physical individual. This indeed has actually been proven, in so far as telepathy is recognized as a fact, at least by some, and soon by all.

The skin and bone, being physical, are adequate barriers to bound other material, but they have no hold over what is not material. A man’s intent is subconsciously sensed by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Telepathy accounts for the usefulness of spoken language. Without telepathy no language would be intelligible. The outward layer of skin, while serving as a physical enclosure, serves as a physical enclosure only for the sake of convenience, as far as distinctions are concerned.

Therefore speaking in physical terms only, the self is not bounded. It is not independent nor self-contained. It needs for its survival nutrients that come from outside of the skin. Not only this, but in all cases its own excretions are needed for nourishment of what is notself, or by what seems to be notself.

As many quite real phenomena cannot be seen by your eyes, so with your outer senses you cannot perceive these constant departures of quality-energy from the self into what seems to be notself. These energies, these thoughts and wishes, travel. They pass through physical matter.

So far we have been talking about matters with which you should be fairly familiar. I have said that each individual helps to construct the physical universe. This construction is continually carried on. The individual uses the energy available to him in these constructions. Therefore these constructions can be said to be projections, in your own time and space, of any given individual.

This will make sense to you as you contemplate it. It is true that these constructions take place on a subconscious level, but to the degree that you realize what you are doing, they will become more comprehensible to the intellect, until full awareness of the origin of physical matter would be reached.

Your own present personalities are merely the result of the particular qualities and ego-images (hyphen) upon which you have chosen to focus your energies and your intent. Initially, before existence upon the physical plane this time, you could just as easily have focused upon a different quality-personality gestalt, although your choice most probably would be in line with a large field of possibilities, possible according to the desires of your entity.

Now. Although you have chosen to form a particular group of qualities into a field pattern of a particular personality, upon which you focus the bulk of your energy, there are also other more shadowy, less well-constructed possibilities of personality selves that exist loosely within the psychic framework of the dominant personality, and these also have their influence. They also attempt physical constructions to a limited degree, and with limited success.

Secondary personalities are gestalts of more or less loosely affiliated psychic events. Unable to find value fulfillment in terms of physical growth and construction as the primary personality can, they seek fulfillment along more accessible lines.

The secondary personalities find fulfillment mainly in the dream world, but the dream world is as actual and as real, as effective and efficient as your own. Here various problems set for the entity are worked out, problems that either are too minor to be handled by a primary self on your plane, or problems that for one reason or another could simply not be solved by physical constructions.

This is extremely important, since the dream world operates within the dimensions of your own psychic field, but utterly divorced from both space-time continuum and physical construction. Here you see the self truly spills over, not only into what you would call notself, but into areas with which the conscious self is barely familiar. On an unconscious level however the self is very aware of the progress of these secondary personalities, and indeed uses this plane itself for the fulfillment and development of qualities originally attached to it, but incompatible with its main intents. The two planes constantly enrich and affect each other.

It is obvious that physically there is no one self, since the molecules and atoms that construct the cells, that construct the organs, change constantly. And yet we say that identity is retained, and yet even what we mean by the core of identity also constantly changes.

The one stability between self and what is notself, and the one and only difference, is not an identity that is part and parcel of constantly changing physical framework, not the outer ego whose conception of who it is constantly changes, according to its age and environment, but the inner self behind all physical constructions.

If you then realize that every physical particle contains its own inner and initial consciousness, then you will see that we have come full circle. The individual or the self is all important. It operates to form as complicated a gestalt as possible, following the law of value fulfillment, and yet in so doing it does not either invade, deny or negate other individual consciousness. It is limitless because there are no limits to the possibilities of its value fulfillment, or to the number of gestalts which it can form.

Now, you should see from this that your universe is therefore itself a gestalt. As an individual cell can be considered to be apart from the rest of the body, as its outer rim can be considered as something that divides it from the rest of the body, so the self can be considered as apart from the universe, and its outer skin thought of as dividing it from the rest of the body.

However, as we know the cell is a part of the body, giving nourishment and receiving nourishment from it. Its outer rim, more correctly, connects it to the body. Parts of it literally travel throughout the body. It is yet an individual. It possesses condensed consciousness and comprehension, it partakes of value fulfillments through the gestalt of which it would not otherwise be capable. If you considered the body as a closed system, which it is not, then you could say that the self of the cell had as its limitations only the limits of the whole closed system. But the system is not closed, and through the participation of the cell in the activities of the body, which is an open system, then you could truly say that the cell itself had no limitations.