“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As you know, so-called inert objects possess consciousness also, though in a more generalized and much less specific manner, in which to a large degree choice is denied to them. It should be apparent that psychic identity is no more dependent upon physical permanence, certainly when you consider that even a chair retains its form as a chair, even though it is actually not one thing or object, and that no atom or molecule remains the same within it.

When you maintain that identity is dependent upon the duration of the physical body, you are taking it for granted that the physical body is one complete thing, more or less rigid in form, and permanent within a certain perspective. You know however that the physical body is not one thing in those terms, and that the stuff of which it is composed is forever coming and going, arriving and departing, and yet identity is maintained.

The limits of identity are arbitrary on your part, developed throughout the stages of your evolutionary process, not for any reason inherent in identity itself, but merely for purely practical reasons on your physical field, having to do with the amount of matter that various kinds of identities could effectively manipulate and control.

In some ways it may be said truly that the physical universe itself puts a limit on the extension of personal identity, and we will go into this also later.

Energy itself is continually new—event, and motion, and no particular pattern will suffice it for long. Energy is self-renewing, and indefinite duration of pattern would lead to dead ends. Energy always builds. Identity, again, is not dependent upon matter. Energy propels and carries along with it, its own traces.

Identity, being independent of matter, is then not finished when the particular physical pattern is no longer created. Energy while being propulsive, is also retentive. It retains what you may call memory of previous gestalts. Capsule comprehension exists even in the smallest particle of energy, and even within the smallest particle of energy there exists all possibilities of development and creation.

A psychic gestalt is dependent upon matter, not for its identity but merely for its survival in the physical plane. Psychic gestalts or identities or individualities are for all practical purposes immortal. They may join other gestalts but they will never be less than they once were. Identity then is never broken down. Any apparent breaking down is never an actual fact, as the personality could be thought of as a breaking down of the entity; but this is not so. The personality did not exist as such before its creation by the entity, and once it becomes an identity, it retains that individuality.