“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Various aspects of the personality exist whether or not you are aware of their existence. When you do become aware of their existence, your awareness in no way negates their independence. You simply expand psychically. Portions of the self live a more or less independent existence, both while the dominant personality sleeps and is awake.

When and if the dominant personality becomes aware of this situation, it automatically expands. It consciously contains experience that was previously subconscious. Now. The inner ego is quite familiar with the existence of the physically-oriented ego, but the physically-oriented ego is not usually familiar with its inner counterpart.

When through training the ego becomes more aware of this inner self, the whole personality benefits. The whole self as it exists at any given time can be glimpsed through studying the actions of the physically-oriented ego, as seen in physical manipulation, and in studying the activities of the inner ego as seen in dream experiences. Obviously some training is necessary before this can be achieved.

Later you may be able to follow this inner self even while the physical ego operates in its normal manner, but this is much more difficult if overall personality balance is to be maintained. It should be fairly obvious that identity hardly resides exclusively within the physically-oriented ego. In one sense, identity is always a becoming, and it can never be a static, finished thing. For it knows itself through change, and that which is finished cannot change.

Your own personalities will set the pace, for they are well-balanced ones. All of this demands spontaneity and control. This is the motion of consciousness. It is unfortunate that identity is considered generally as a rather static and permanent acknowledgment, for it is not.

Consider this analogy: The self as a moving circle, such as a Ferris wheel. A tree in front of the wheel will represent physical reality. The whole self, or the whole wheel, is composed of many selves in various positions, as the many people who sit on the Ferris wheel. As the wheel turns you call the person or the self who faces the tree the ego, simply because this is the portion that faces physical reality, represented by our tree. But the self who faces the tree one moment is not the self that faces it the next moment, and the operator of the wheel is never in evidence, you see.

The selves who ride the wheel therefore also provide some of the power that runs the wheel. It is only because you stress similarities rather than differences that you do not realize that the self that you call the ego is but the appearance, in one particular perspective, of many quite different aspects of the personality.

You are receiving instructions, you see, now in physical reality. You are also receiving instructions in other realities. You are not aware of these consciously. Certain portions of your personalities are learning, within their own perspective, to venture into physical reality, as you are learning to venture into nonphysical reality.

The psychology of personality cannot be grasped unless reincarnation is taken into consideration, but even then this only represents energy operating within one system. The personality operates simultaneously within many systems. Projection represents practical application. Such experience allows you to unite various aspects of the self, and to bring the whole self into sharper focus. As a rule projection in some areas can only be achieved by those who are living their last earthly cycle.

It is true that the whole personality, or whole self, does not directly manifest itself within physical reality.

However, the personality as it is manifested can never be understood if it is taken alone. There are sufficient hints and signs that do appear, to give evidence of these other portions of the self. Now there is one important point in particular in all this that should be emphasized, and I will repeat it: Certain portions of the self do not manifest themselves directly within physical reality. They do not operate directly within physical reality, and the word directly is significant.

(Nor did Jane know the diagram for parallax. We believe she was on the right track in spite of her semantic difficulty, however, with the roads data and the white markings, areas between, etc. Jane’s personal idea was that Seth used parallelogram to lead up to the rest of the data here. In this respect see page 274, where Seth mentions Jane’s associations.