“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is of course necessary at this stage of your development that selectivity be used, and that some standards be drawn that will effectively define apparent limitations and boundaries. The area within these limitations and boundaries you call the self. The self expands as your ability grows, as you learn to retain identity in the midst of diversity.

In some respects this dissipates the energy, of course. In the dream state you manipulate energy more directly. This is what you are doing of course in self-hypnosis: But, used for therapy, you are still trying to affect or change something physical.

In the existence of what you call the radio stars you have energy that is being manipulated more directly than you can imagine—energy knowing itself, highly individualized. You have self structures so intense that they are able to handle an infinite variety of impressions, share them, use them, and still retain individual identities.

You cannot for that matter perceive yourselves directly, but only through the sense apparatus which has been adopted by the self. You perceive directly psychological experiences, but you do not perceive these in their undiluted form. You protect yourselves and automatically sift out what is too vivid or intense at any given time.

You do not even perceive sense data with a third of the vividness of which you are capable. This has to do again with the self-protection used. The self does not perceive any impressions, you see, which are so vivid that it could be overwhelmed. As the self learns then it allows greater and more intense impressions.

In most instances the full and uninhibited use, even of the outer senses, could sweep an insecure self into fragments. The strength and intensity of any impression cannot be stronger or more intense than the perceiver.

Full and uninhibited use of even the outer senses would lead you to inner reality. Usually only a strong and disciplined self, a well-structured identity, can perceive in this manner, and then only occasionally. Full operation of inner and outer senses, you see, in your present stage of development as a race, would be blinding, as you can see in your reading of drug experiences.

An occurrence only remotely approaching this can be disastrous. Not because it is basically undesirable, for such an experience has the greatest potentials for development of the self. Such experiences can be disastrous simply because the self structure is not yet strong enough to assimilate and contain the intensity of the experience. In many cases dream experiences, as I have mentioned, are much more vivid and intense than waking experience. You do not even remember the majority of these. But the inner self is more flexible, you see, than the ego, and it can therefore contain greater intensities without undue alarm.