“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The personality and the ego are not the same.

The personality is that consciousness of self of which I have spoken, which is aware of itself within, and a part of, action. The ego attempts to stand apart from action, and to stand apart from the personality, and to mold the personality into a more or less permanent and stable, dependent portion of the ego itself.

The ego would if it could, stop personality’s motion and development for the security of stability. The ego would drive the personality into preconceived channels. This consciousness-of-self—I suggest hyphens between consciousness-of-self—this consciousness-of-self is seen in man as personality, as the human personality. It appears, however, in all types of consciousness to one degree or another.

Therefore, consciousness-of-self can appear with or without the existence of an ego. Consciousness-of-self is an attribute then of all physical species, regardless of their classification. Personality, human personality, is simply the name given to this class of self, as applied and seen within human beings. Personality changes and acts upon all other action. Personality, then, can be seen to operate as a field of action in identity; but identity that is conscious of its relation to action as a whole.

The peculiar and individualistic aspects of personality are the result of those camouflaging abilities of which we have spoken earlier. Those portions of the personality which escape ego’s attempts to dominate are held suspect in ego’s eyes. Ego considers them as invalid and dangerous to its own supremacy. When ego is forced to admit that personality changes, it will do its best to avoid this knowledge. The more rigid an ego is, the more danger there is that the individual will have difficulties in all kinds of adjustments.

Because of its nature ego does not want to adjust. It wants adjustments to be made to it. Because ego is another manifestation of action, it is of course impossible for its aims to be realized. For all its attempts at stability and control, ego itself constantly changes. Ego most of all resents and fights against time as you know it, yet ego is to a large extent responsible for your conception of time. Basically, ego fears both the past and the present. It fears the past because it has already lost control of the past. It fears the future because it is not yet in control of it. It seeks continuity of identity, yet it is forced to realize that the “I” of today is hardly the “I” of thirty years ago.

It is the ego which fears death so strongly. And yet the stability which ego so urgently seeks would, indeed, result in a death, since no further action would be allowed.

Ego also fears spontaneity, for it cannot control action; being a part of action, most of its efforts of necessity are thwarted. Yet it is precisely this struggle between ego’s struggles for stability, and the personality’s attempt to expand spontaneously, that is at the basis of much of mankind’s achievements, and that is certainly the basis for much of his art.

In his art we have the nostalgia of the ego for past time, and for lost control of a self that has already vanished, and changed into something new. It is ego who plans for the future, trying to anticipate the environment in which it must operate. Its anticipations, of course, then form that environment.

The ego therefore is a very necessary force within your field. It is also, regardless of current psychological beliefs, the basis for aggression, in general. All aggression is not detrimental, for example.

The personality is not the whole self. It is a portion of the whole self, which is activated during a particular existence. The ego, as I have explained, does not vanish. However, it must always be remembered here that the ego is not the self-conscious self in its entirety by any means. It is simply a portion, a field of focus whereby the self attempts to objectify itself within the world of matter.

Theoretically, the self is unlimited, if you will recall. The ego within your field is limited because of the nature of its rigidity. The ego operates as a partitioning agent. It directs and uses the abilities of the personality for manipulation in the physical universe. It can mobilize a smaller or larger amount of these energies according to its own strength. It has a small focus but a powerful one.

A thorough study of the personality will be an excellent exercise, and will lead you close to the nature of action itself. The experiences about which you asked, for example, involved actions of the personality and not, of course, of the ego. Expansion and contraction occur constantly as characteristic of action, as I have explained.

The ego is scarcely conscious of these. Your experiences occurred when the ego, because of your illness, was momentarily exhausted, its control lessened. The personality was then momentarily aware of realities that the ego would ordinarily attempt to block. These were pulsations, in actuality of corresponding strength, but interpreted differently by you.

It must, once again, be realized that there is no particular point where ego begins or ends.

There is no particular and definite line between the ego and the personality and the inner self. They must merely be discussed in such terms. There is, believe it or not, no particular and specific and definite boundary between what is self and not self. If we isolate such portions of reality for the sake of discussion, such isolation is artificial, and in no way affects the nature of reality itself.

The ego fears death, yet in the space of your own physical lifetime portions of the self have undergone like transformations endless times, of which the ego is unaware.