“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.

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.

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.

This will be a lengthy discussion, and I suggest that you take your break. Be careful of what you do with the pieces.

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.

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.

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.

I hope you can follow me here. We have spoken of the dream world, and of its having a psychic reality, without space or time as you know it, and an evolution and value fulfillment quite independent of the meager attention that you give it.

These secondary personalities, known to psychologists, have a much more important place within reality than is suspected. No psychic action is invalid. Every psychic action exists, has an effect and has durability in terms of value fulfillment. Every psychic action, and a psychic action is any psychic happening such as a dream, or thought, that may have no existence in terms of space and time, every psychic action then contains within it the potentialities of value fulfillment, transference, and even energy transformation.

Now again, no psychic action is static. Nor is it sterile. The dream world may have no material reality in your plane, and yet its existence in many respects is no less than what you consider reality. The difference is only in the amount of energy which you focus and the direction in which you focus it.

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.

“I am myself” simply does not mean the same thing to a child, an adolescent, a young adult and an old adult. Though the individual may seem to be the same, and though he retains his memories, he is not the same; and, even his memories are colored by the various differences in what “I am myself” comes to mean.

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.

You have both been slightly weary however, and since the material comes through much more easily now, I can say what I want with fewer words. I do not want either of you to become overtired, and I do not want to prolong a session when I have delivered my lecture for the night, simply because of any arbitrary idea of time involved, especially when you can both use the sleep.

My very best regards to you both, and do not feel upset at my closing a bit early. I know perhaps better than either of you when you become weary, and I also know when to press ahead. You must by now have some idea of what it means to take so much of your clock time for our sessions.

(Friday, 5/29, 3:30 PM: Upon reaching the desired state I then fell asleep. In a short time I was awakened by a child’s voice speaking briefly but loudly in my right ear. Just before coming awake I had a brief impression of a man and a boy at a table or bench, upon which were some model trains. Loren and Dougie? If so I did not recognize them, nor understand what the boy said. On this day Jane and I sent Linda a graduation present. [She and Dougie are Loren’s children.]

(I then had repeated glimpses of a silhouetted male figure seen from the back, wearing a pointed helmet and a greatcoat, such as perhaps German officers wore in the past. The right hand held a club or truncheon; the right arm rose and fell regularly, although the rhythm was not rapid. I could not see what if anything the figure was striking. This experience had some duration.