“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.

A consciousness is characterized by the particular ways in which it views or perceives available action. It is characterized by the type of action which it is more likely to perceive. It is characterized by the pattern of perception itself.

Action, you may say, is carried away by itself. Reality possibilities are endless. You are familiar with very small portions of reality. Your perception characteristics at this time dictate and limit the aspects of action that you can perceive. You can, however, focus very clearly on other aspects. And particular types of consciousnesses and identities are merely the result of action’s formation into perception patterns with which it can focus upon certain aspects of itself.

It may be thought that such perception patterns or identities may be limited, but this is hardly the case. For without them, whole portions of reality would never be perceived. There is much here that will take us a long while to explain, for the line can theoretically be drawn anywhere in the formation of identities and consciousness. And herein lies your freedom.

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.

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, 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 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.