“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As I have said, there are gentle, imperceptible gradations between what is called self and what is called notself. Your idea, or psychologists’ idea of environment for example, will come close to what I mean. The self indeed however reaches out in many ways to form, mold and construct his own environment, even as it in turn reaches out to affect his core of self.

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.

The individual self is, therefore, literally a part of what would seem to be completely different objects. In a shorthand you could say that the self is the object which he contemplates, since indeed he constructed the object to begin with from the self.

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.

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.