“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Since matter does disintegrate, or seems to, you take it for granted that this dissolution is inherent within it, but this is not the case. The focus of energy that organizes the physical body weakens, strays; the trance state, strongest at what you call early adulthood, begins to lose its hold even as in childhood it has not yet attained its full depth.

By adulthood the trance, the intense focus, is most strongly upon him. It is after this period that the trance little by little weakens its hold. By the period you call old age the inner attention is already escaping. The strong focus of psychic energy needed to maintain the splendid physical image-organization is no longer given. The conscious ego with which you are familiar cries out its bewilderment, for has it not always sensed immortality?

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.