“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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 habitual pattern or characteristic nature of the ego may then be led to refuse to accept an emotion, at the same time that a pattern has already been set to receive the particular type of emotion. Here the ego fights against itself. Such an emotion may of course be given release through dreams, but this is of limited value to the ego involved, since the ego does not accept the reality of dream existence.

Inclinations with which the ego has very little liking, for example, are very seldom a problem for the ego, since they remain generally outside of the ego pattern, never having been chosen by it to form a characteristic part of the ego pattern. Obviously, to some degree every conceivable sort of inclination is latent to the ego, but it is apparent that each ego has its peculiar set of adopted characteristics, its set of characteristics that it sometimes accepts and sometimes rejects; and it is obvious that some characteristics simply seem alien to any given ego.

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.