“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I spoke, for example, of the acquiescence of action at certain levels to any kind of stimuli, indiscriminately, whether painful or pleasurable. Without this basic acquiescence, actions would not have been given the freedom to break patterns down and evolve new ones of them. This is not necessarily a more primitive aspect. It is simply a basic characteristic of action at certain levels, and the human personality, with its complicated ego structure, is nevertheless composed of many actions that operate at this level.

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.