“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In such a case, however, the shiftings still come from within. The active gestalt of the personality is indeed so complex, the actions that compose it are so intertwined, that only the deep, interior intuitions of the personality involved will ever come close to a complete understanding of the workings of the particular personality system.

Such understanding simply cannot follow logical lines. The intellect may indeed grasp some of this understanding from the intuitions, but the intellect itself is aware of only minute portions of the whole personality. Again, this is not meant to minimize the value of the intellect. The fact remains that answers sought by a personality can only be found through a traveling within the actions that compose the self. Within our last session, I explained some of the basic psychological heritage that resides within the action makeup of the personality. There is no escaping this heritage, and it is so important that without it the personality system could not be built up.

The very nature of the ego and of the personality is formed by the ability to choose between actions or stimuli; but life as it is not connected to a highly differentiated ego, rejoices in all stimuli, as sensation, whether it is pleasurable or painful, for these distinctions do not exist in your terms. In the beginning of our sessions I spoke in a general manner, for example, saying that trees and plant life had a consciousness, but not a developed ego system. The tree, therefore, is conscious of the pain connected with, say, the severing of a limb.

You cannot probe into the one system without affecting the others. It is basically meaningless to consider the personality as separate from the simultaneous actions of which it is composed. The personality, as you know, has also a reality within the dream universe. It should be obvious that in a most basic and practical manner the personality however is not involved with physical time to any degree. Only a part of the personality, the ego, is so involved. It is obvious of course that the personality system will react to stimuli that seem, to the ego, to be far divorced in time. That is, the personality may react to a stimuli in the present that occurred originally twenty years ago, to the ego’s understanding of time.

But past, present and future as such simply do not have meaning to the other aspects of the personality. The idea and reality of physical time parallels the development of the ego. Consciousness of self, alone, is unaware of your physical time. The physical time idea is a product of the ego’s tendency to make finer distinctions in order that it can classify and categorize, and therefore identify and give permanence to its own sensations.