“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You may refer here to past sessions dealing with the mechanisms involved. Existence within any field of reality necessitates intensive focus within that field. It involves something like a sleight of hand trick, played by one part of the whole self upon another part. As an actor in a drama goes along with certain acts and gestures that make the play necessary, while at the same time he realizes that the play is a play, he must still focus his attention upon the lines spoken, and use the props available.

In much the same manner, existence within the physical universe involves the most intense self-hypnotic trance, where attention becomes riveted and focused along certain lines while other realities are of necessity closed out of one’s perception and comprehension for a certain while.

No play can go on forever. Individual focus cannot be intensely maintained indefinitely. Neither can the vibrant, almost fanatical focus of the self within the limitations of one field continue indefinitely.

Energy cannot be imprisoned for long within one form. The individual whole self, by its very nature, will not restrain itself indefinitely to the particular set of necessities and perceptions necessary for survival within any one given field of reality.

But the outer ego as you know is that portion of the whole self that is given over to the maintenance of physical manipulations, and it perceives only through those physical equipments, those outer senses. It sees its dominion in jeopardy and rises up in arms. It, the ego, is that small portion of the whole self which the whole self has allowed to be completely, or almost completely, bewitched by the self-hypnotic trance. It is that portion which believes implicitly in the given specifications of the hypnotist, and as such it will be last to leave the trance.

During that period you refer to as old age, once again emotionally and psychologically the individual is less bound by physical time. He no longer, that is the whole self no longer, makes available sufficient psychic energy however for the maintenance of the physical organism.

This accounts for the disintegration. There is much more that must be said along these lines, and in time we will go into further discussion. However, the main focus of the whole self has already begun to stray, and the energies used in necessary pattern organization for the physical plane are already being returned, taken from their attention to physical matters, and becoming more attuned to the whole self from which they were originally delegated.

Now. A more complicated, involved, intricate physical organization, such as man, necessitates on the part of the whole self a tremendous outlay of energy for maintenance of the psychic-(hyphen) physical structural relationship.