“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The four faces of Eve all represented various ego manifestations of one inner identity. The course of the ego is a precarious one, and any number of potential egos exist within any identity. The Three Faces of Eve is an excellent title for the book, since the ego may quite legitimately be compared to the face that the identity turns toward objective reality, or the living mask that it dons.

The inner self is always in the process of trying to perfect the nature of that ego which it has adopted. The ego, as you know, is never the same. It bears indeed the stresses that result from daily encounters with physical situations, but it also reaps the rewards that are involved.

The inner self chooses from its available potential personalities the one that it finds most adequate. Sometimes it simply makes an error, for the inner self is not a perfected thing, any more than the ego is. But identity does exist, and the ego is but a pseudoidentity formed for utilitarian reasons, and as such it is of course a part of the basic identity from which it springs.

It has its own possibilities of development and achievement. This should not be forgotten, and all potential egos have, also, their own possibilities. The inner self or identity must express itself through its ego in order to manipulate within physical reality. The inner self is composed of all the potential egos that compose it, but it is more than the sum of these.

Now these potential egos, you see, made up of various potentials and needs and abilities, these pooled resources that belong to the inner identity, did not simply spring into existence. They are the result of psychological experience gained in past lives.

The energy that composes personality therefore consists of an inconceivable number of separate identities. These separate identities form what we call the inner self, which retains its individuality even while the energy that composes it constantly changes. There are continual groupings and regroupings, but basic identities are always retained. The potential egos within any given identity therefore retain their own individuality and self-knowledge, regardless of their relative importance in the order of command.