“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now, we will speak again concerning action.

Our material on the fifth dimension seemed almost infinite to you at the time. That is, the fifth dimension appeared infinite in its complexity, but you see that it is but one dimension within an infinite number of dimensions. For there are infinite possibilities in the patterns which action can of itself form.

I do not intend to number indefinitely, or list, an endless number of dimensions of actuality, though we will go into this later to some small degree. I am much more concerned for now that you understand the dimensions of action as they exist within the dream world, within psychological realities, and within other scopes with which you are yourselves somewhat familiar.

Your experiments with the pendulum are quite helpful to you, in that the subconscious is allowed, through its own action, to make itself more readily available. Your own conscious awareness is increased because you are then aware of inner actions with which the conscious mind had not been familiar. Here we have a coming together of actions, a joining and an immersion of one action within another: the action of the subconscious in answering questions put to it by the conscious mind, (use brain rather than mind), and the acceptance, which is itself action on the part of consciousness, of the answers received.

Here the self, by becoming part of greater action, increases its own ability to deal with action. The principle that action acts upon itself is extremely important when we are dealing with psychological action. The principle that action is self-generating, and that it cannot be withdrawn, is also vital in connection with psychological action.

Energy cannot be retained. It must be discharged. The very attempt to deny an action automatically changes the nature of the action, and also changes the nature of the individual who attempts to deny it. All energy seeks to materialize itself, which is another way of saying that action must act.

In the psychological realm it goes without saying that a repressed emotion is never really repressed, since action cannot be retained. It must change. The cause of such difficulties lies not in the repression of an emotion, for this is impossible. The emotion in one way or another, will out, but the difficulty lies in the attempt to repress the emotion. This attempt is itself an action.

An action has reality, as you know, within every possible field of activity. An emotion has an electrical and chemical structure. This is extremely important. It is not a structure that takes up space as you know it, obviously, but it is a structure nevertheless, and could be compared to the appearance of dream locations.

Emotions are a quite natural portion of action, and left to themselves are fluid. They have electrical validity, and shape. When an attempt is made to reject an emotion, this does not affect the emotion half as much as it affects the individual involved. The act of rejection in itself is detrimental and doomed to failure.

If you toss a ball in a dream, neither the self that tosses the ball, nor the ball, exist in any space structure as you know it. In somewhat the same manner are emotion structures handled. A refusal or a denial, an attempt not to handle a particular emotional structure involves action. The refusal itself is an action.

What you have here is an attempt to objectify, or stand apart from action in such a refusal. This is not the fault of the subconscious, but a fault of the ego, which refuses to assimilate or accept a given action. As you know, it is the ego who exists as a result of such objectivity. All the qualities that make up the ego are objectified to that degree, but they are collected about the ego with the ego as center. When the ego however refuses to accept an emotion as a part of itself, it tries one of two actions.

Either it attempts to return the emotion to a subjective state, or it attempts to objectify it further away from itself. In either case the ego is at fault for not assimilating or accepting the emotion. It is easy to see then that the ego is itself a series of actions, that it is a collection of more or less similar actions, selected from a larger mainstream of other actions.

You will recall that the ego, while disliking change, is nevertheless dependent for its identity upon change. The ego to a large degree, therefore, chooses during its development those characteristic actions which will form its nature. Because the ego necessarily changes however, actions or emotions which at one time it chose as acceptable, at a later date so to speak it may attempt to deny.

The strength of the ego actually depends on the flexibility with which it can accept and assimilate ever more complex actions, and give them a unity of its own. An action or emotion not accepted by the ego, but nevertheless a part of it, will always drain energy from the main core of the ego, despite the ego’s denial, and energy that cannot therefore be used by the ego for the purposes of its own purposeful action.

The rejected emotion, in other words, will express itself in any case, but it will do so then as a rebel, outside of the organizational directives of the ego itself. Hence for example, actions that appear senseless to the ego are often the results of such unassimilated or denied emotions. At one time or another such emotions were acceptable to the ego. There was an attraction, or the emotion would not have been permitted to enter into a realm close to ego control.

It is therefore with the second alternating group of characteristics that most such problems arise. An ego who can, and has at one time or another accepted as part of itself a violent and unruly desire to kill, for example, will not automatically reject the emotion of hatred. He may dislike it, but he will recognize it as a part of himself during whatever period it is assimilated. An ego which once accepted such an idea of violence, and knew it as a possibility of action, such an ego, if he then rejects the conception, can no longer afford, ever, to recognize this once acceptable emotion, for he is only too aware of the action that could have at one time developed.

It is in this area that such conflicts arise. The man, or ego, who has never really accepted such violence as a part of his action pattern, will usually have no conflicts in this particular line, simply because the inclination was never a strong part of the ego’s inner image, and is more or less discarded automatically, along with all those other characteristics or inclinations which are not in his ego pattern.

This is obviously somewhat simplified, in that the ego constantly changes, and the above examples must be read carefully or their meaning could be misinterpreted. Actions may appear to be separate, but they are all part of other actions, this being of course the basis for all organization, including that of the ego and the inner self.

Groupings of actions of any kind merge into other groupings, both within the physical field and outside of it. All apparent units are merely formed by functions, the functions of action. In this context the ego is also a function of action. There are of course also functions within functions, which should be obvious.

The ego itself attempts as its function to be the director and center of other functions. The ego, while considering itself apart from action, is obviously not apart from it. As dreams allow the inner self great freedom, and as in dreams great perspectives of time are available, and great freedom in space, though no space as you know it is involved, so it is possible for the ego itself to achieve the experience of freedom from time and space, if it would only allow itself for a short while to relax the intensity of its objective focus.

It could still do this and retain its own nature, merely by allowing into its awareness the reality of other actions as a part of its self-image. There is for example no basic reason why the subconscious and the ego cannot communicate to a much larger extent than is now usual. Such communication would result in the acceptance of additional energy and action by the ego, and an expansion of the ego’s self-image.

The hope and the possibilities here, as well as some of the dangers, lie in the fact that the ego does indeed change, and is not one specific reality but a series or group of actions, with direction, that have the potentiality for unlimited value fulfillment. The ego will never be less than it is now. It may very well be more. Possibilities for development here are very great, but most such possibilities lie still in the future, and only, so far, as possibilities. There is nothing that will force the ego to enlarge the scope of its awareness.

We will shortly launch into a new discussion, though there are still some matters to be cleared in our material on action. I will now close the session, or if you prefer you may take a short break and continue.