“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We will continue our discussion concerning action and identities. I have said that identity is a part of action, and basically inseparable from action. Identity attempts to form meaningful patterns and relationships from action. Consciousness is action that perceives itself. The ego is action’s attempt to stand off from itself.

Action may show itself as motion, but it is much more than motion in the terms which you usually use, and motion is but one small dimension within action’s realm. All types of consciousness represent a different focus of energy’s perception within itself. There is no past or future to action. All action is simultaneous. Identities, some identities and some forms of consciousness, particularly the ego, perceive a past or a present, but this is merely the result of the manner in which such identities and consciousnesses view available data.

This, when it occurs, and this particular formation into a self may or may not occur, but when it occurs it is a result of our second previously mentioned dilemma. The self as you know it is in actuality a self plus an ego.

The ego, if you recall, is self’s attempt to set itself apart from action, and to see or perceive action as an object. The ego attempts to attain stability and dominance, and resents change. It seeks to limit certain perceptions, to block out many perceptions of which the self is knowledgeable. In this way limitations become fairly rigid.

An ego could be compared to a small dam in this respect. However, action constantly forms perceptual patterns in which it can view itself. Again, these patterns are formed one within the other, and they could be said to form that imaginary structure which we called the fifth dimension, so many sessions ago.

Yet as you can see, what it was when we spoke of it is still present in what it will by now have become. The ego, through its own nature and characteristics, attempts to limit such change, but it succeeds only in limiting itself by limiting its perceptions. It still must change, as is obvious. But it changes along certain lines, moving within certain patterns of perception which are characteristic of it.

It cannot maintain stability, for all its efforts, and it cannot in any way limit the self. It, the ego, merely does not perceive because it will not perceive those other perception patterns, and that larger scope with which the whole self is constantly involved.

The self, then, is not static by any means. It has no arbitrary boundaries. The term itself is used only for convenience; and indeed the concept of the self is a concept of the ego, which considers itself the self.

The self then, unknown to the ego, perceives itself in a vast variety of experiences, and in, indeed, a vast number of realities. Each of these so-called realities, for one blends into the other, could be termed, or viewed as, a separate field. Each is therefore composed of the characteristic perception patterns that happen to lie within it, and these so-called minor fields could then be termed other selves, or minor selves, from the standpoint of the self that we are considering.

The fact is, that any given self, as we have described the self, may have more than one ego, though these egos will not be aware of each other, even though operating simultaneously. You have information on the inner ego. There is also a dream ego, in that there is within that reality field a directive part of the self that is concerned with the construction of purpose and meaning.

(Break at 10:25. Jane was again well dissociated. For material on the inner ego, the self-conscious self behind the self-conscious self, see the 28th session.

The deeply and strongly dimensioned sphere I used as an analogy for an action, if you recall, for any portion of action; you can now indeed further imagine one entity being composed of such an action, with egos like many faces looking outward in all directions, and each perceiving vastly different fields of reality; looking inward and outward, backward and forward as it were, through and beyond. And yet each action, or entity, is a part of another, and is both within and without another. And none of it is meaningless, and yet in a basic manner all of it has the meaning that you give it.

And what meaning you give it is there, and part of it, since you who project the meaning are yourselves part of it. The inner self is, therefore, that inner portion of action which forms the egos, and the selves, through the dilemmas of which I have spoken.