“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The definition of course stands. I merely would like to be sure that the correct interpretation is given to the definition. The self, or a self, is not any particular thing, as I told you. It is true that there are no boundaries to enclose it within safe confines, where it can be said, “Here is the self.”

It is also true however that this lack of boundary allows for possibilities of development and expansion that would be impossible with a limited self. The self is not nebulous. Action changes itself, as we have described. Any self, therefore, is never the same self, but action contains within itself its own comprehension.

Because there is no time, as you think of time, we will not say that action retains a memory of all its previous actions or selves, for this would be misleading. Action is aware of itself in all of its spontaneous and simultaneous workings. The self that you are, in a basic sense, is the self that you were in past instances within this existence, the self or series of selves that you were in previous existences within the physical field, and also the myriad selves that you are now, in various perception experiences unknown to the ego.

Your self is all this, as well as the selves that you would call future selves. I wanted to make it clear that the self at any moment, while being no one thing, being indeed a series of simultaneous happenings, so to speak, is however far from meaningless, containing within it full inner comprehension of its various portions.

(Jane had been delivering the above paragraph with many pauses. I now began to sneeze, without warning. Jane sat quietly, waiting for me to stop. Her eyes remained closed, and she rocked back and forth gently. My sneezing certainly constituted an interruption of sorts, yet Jane’s reaction to this was placid, her trance state unbroken. Had someone pounded on the door abruptly and broken Jane’s state she would have been painfully aware of it.

The inner self would be then any given outthrust of original action outward, as explained earlier. This outthrust would, because of its nature, instantly send further outthrusts in as many directions as possible for it. And because it is action, and because no action can complete itself, and no action can completely materialize, then each outthrust or materialization would result in an in-thrust; not into the original action from which it came, but into itself.

Value fulfillment opens the many eyes of the self to its various portions. It enables the self to expand, to join in a gestalt with other selves. It is only your ego which leads you to believe that such an expansion would result in a lessening of consciousness on the one hand, or an invasion of other selves on the other.

(I might add here that my arbitrary designation of an average pause on Jane’s part might run to perhaps ten seconds. A long or very long pause thus would run twenty or thirty seconds. These are not rare. As said before, while in the state Jane is not aware of the pauses; as far as she is concerned they might as well not exist; or conversely, they could be an hour long.

If the self were the ego then indeed such precepts would be necessary, but the ego is a small part of the self. Necessary indeed, still, but less necessary than it once was.

(Jane said that as soon as she resumed her seat she felt carried away. She entered the state more rapidly than she would like. Also, the end came so quickly that she found herself groping briefly, in an effort to “put herself together again.” The experience made her uneasy.

(Jane said she believes Seth is using these experiences, within the experience of the session itself, as a compensation for the psychological time experiments he has requested her to abandon for a while. It will be remembered that in the 140th session Seth stated that at times Jane would advance “too fast, too soon”, with her own experiments. She speculated that these recent experiments within experiences were Seth’s ideas re a more controlled approach.)