“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In a most basic manner, a denial of stimuli is a negative action, if any action could be called negative. I do not, of course, speak in human terms, where every stimuli for example should then be followed or sought out indiscriminately. This is not my meaning. I am talking of deeper biological levels, and indeed of levels that are buried within tissue itself.

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.

It does not fear destruction however, as the ego does. It still fights for survival, of course; but the consciousness of plant life involves a consciousness of self as it operates within action. It sees or feels itself as a part of continuing action, and because of this inner atomic knowledge it does not fear destruction, basically, knowing that it will be changed into other kinds of action.

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.