“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The characteristics of the ego therefore change as various situations are met. The term ego, implying one phenomena, is therefore confusing. What was ego today may belong to the subconscious tomorrow. Any attempt at rigidity is therefore defeating.

The situations had changed but the ego framework had grown rigid, rigid enough so that it could in a large degree dominate certain normally subconscious processes, bringing forth the physical symptoms. Now there is always an imprinting process within the personality, belonging to past experience. A previous inclination to gluttony had once led him to some slight gout, and in the present case there was a swelling of the feet.

The stability of the whole self is dependent upon the mobility of each portion of the self. When the physical system is in good operating order, then the various portions of the self are operating properly. The fault will not always lie with the conscious or subconscious, however, but in other layers.

You see however he felt that he was learning maturity by ignoring the subconscious. This is at the base of these problems. He mistrusted the most reliable portion of his present personality. He automatically rejected the sweaters as giving warmth on a subconscious basis.

Even then, however, the subconscious would not be forced too far, and a good deal of the time the sweaters sat in his drawer. They were not his style, they were his mother’s style and in wearing them he felt further alarm that he was being cast in her world, so to speak.

Only the last one was simple. His letters of thanks protested too much. He wore the sweater night and day in a frenzied attempt to prove that it I had no harmful effects upon him. From the subconscious standpoint this was simply too much.