“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(By 8:45 no witnesses had appeared. Up from her nap Jane felt both nervous and sleepy. The thought had come to her that Seth would discuss the self and the notself tonight. As session time approached our cat Willy put on one of his performances, persistently diving at Jane’s legs and ankles; as usual he calmed down as soon as the session began.

Ruburt was correct. I was going to speak concerning the self and the so-called notself, so that we can clear up a few matters. It does seem to me however that we have been very sober of late, dealing with weighty concerns. However, I take my chances, getting good material through when the time is right, and we can be more jovial on those evenings when you are too tired to do anything else.

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.

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.

Therefore a thought, surely one of the most intimate possessions of a self, does not remain within the self. The thought belongs to the individual from whose mind it sprang, and yet he does not really possess it. He can keep it but he cannot keep it. He can hold it as his own, and yet he cannot prevent it from passing on to others, though he presses his lips tightly and does not speak it aloud.

An individual or a self also cannot hide from others his own basic intent. It is his and yet, though he possesses it, he still cannot prevent others from sensing it. Along these lines there is much to be said in that many intangibles, considered most secret by the self, do not remain within the self. No skin or bones or skeletal cage can keep the thought of the self from going outward.

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.

For practical purposes you might say, and for practical purposes only, that on your plane the self is limited only by the fields of energy that it can control. The self in nonphysical terms, in psychological, psychic and philosophic terms is not limited theoretically.

Those qualities, those attributes which the self considers most its own, are in no way bounded; nor can they be held in by the self. Thoughts, dreams, purposes and intents, plans and wishes are constantly speeding outward from the core of self unimpeded. They are not closeted within the skull as you might think.

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.

Each self is therefore not only ejecting almost in missile fashion such energy from his own core, but he is also constantly impinged by such energy from others. He chooses to translate whatever portions of this energy he so chooses, back into forms that can be picked up and understood by his own mechanism.

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.

The self, then, is far from limited even on your own plane. I mentioned, or hinted however that the influence of the self, and therefore the self itself, also had reaching effects in realities that did not consist of a space-time continuum. This would have to follow if my statement that the self is truly limitless is true.

No psychic action is static. These secondary personalities cannot be referred to as full selves, yet they can certainly not be set aside as so-called not-selves. They come into some prominence and fulfillment through dreams, and through enticing the main personality at times into the adoption of conscious or unconscious thoughts which would ordinarily not be chosen by the primary self, and therefore at times altering the course of the primary self.

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.

The gradations, I admit, are extremely gentle. Nevertheless the end result of each gradation brings us to the conclusion that the self, while being individual because of its inner counterpart or inner self, is unlimited. Yet no invasion occurs.