“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It dabbles in both your future and your past, speaking now in your terms. As you create a painting, and the painting is still an aspect of yourself, so it creates the whole personality, which is an aspect of itself. It operates in both the waking and the dream state. It often forms the content of each. It is more knowledgeable than any one aspect of the personality. It is more knowledgeable than all other aspects of the personality, for it forms them together into a cohesive whole.

If only the physically-oriented ego survived, very little indeed would survive at all. The physically-oriented ego is hardly aware of your experiences in their entirety. The physically-oriented ego, if it alone survived, would contain only your conscious memories. Even now, in physical existence, you operate on a much deeper and more complicated level than this. Events and experiences which are forgotten, or which escaped the physically-oriented ego, still affect your activities in this life, and if they did not your physical existence would be brief indeed. (Jane pounded the tabletop for emphasis, eyes wide and dark.) Any survival that was based upon the survival of the physically-oriented ego alone would be as shallow as a paper cutout. These things escape you. You take it for granted that the physically-oriented ego represents your own psychological identity, you see, and this is an illusion. It contains a portion of your psychological feeling of identity, but only that.

Feelings and sensations and memories that it knows nothing of have built up your psychological identity, and given you a sense of continuity. Of these this ego knows but little. Intimacy with your self and with your own identity, that is intimate knowledge of your own identity, resides in all portions of the self, and is not dependent upon a survival based upon the survival of the physically-oriented ego. This would represent a sham of a survival indeed.

There is a basic difference you see between a survival personality, and the personality as you know it. The individual in physical life shows his surface face, so to speak, outward. Inner psychological realities are hidden beneath the physically-oriented ego simply because it cannot afford to deal with them. Its one main purpose is simply to allow the personality to operate effectively within its physical environment.

It is true however to say that the memories of the physically-oriented ego take their place with memories that were once subconscious. I am speaking now of the psychological makeup of the survival personality. The memories remain in physical existence. There is no real distinction between psychological reality and physical reality. The physically-oriented ego manufactures this distinction of necessity.

The survival personality does not need to do this. To him all realities are psychological realities, a thought as real as a chair—in fact, much more real. Therefore, communications between survival personalities and physically-oriented personalities are bound to suffer difficulties, and these difficulties are the result of the change of psychological frameworks.