“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now to return to our discussion. The matter of time is highly important if you have any hopes of understanding the self in its entirety, or other personalities that do not operate within your system. The psychological frameworks are so different. The apparent cause and effect sequence is absent, and identity knows itself as itself through other means than continuity, in your terms.

Your ego gains assurance from what seems to be the memory of its immediate past. A man who loses memory of past events feels insecure and lost, but other types of personality gestalts operate far differently. Instead of a time sequence that governs or seems to govern thought, mental activity of any kind, and overt action, you have associative processes, offshoots, and possibilities. To some extent you can gain an idea of this through an examination of your own stream of consciousness. But the comparison is highly superficial, for here too continuity reigns, even though associations are given greater play.

As a personality learns to use its abilities it becomes more aware of complexity, and able to operate as an identity within it. Since I have known your time it is meaningful for me, though it no longer hampers me. I merely understand its reality for you. Other psychological structures have not been initially aware of this peculiar relationship between your physical framework and your time concept.

There is in all of this an order. It is an order that the inner self is to learn. It is intuitively known, but it must be realized. There are personalities far more developed than my own; there are personalities that operate in a context that even I would find extremely alien, but no particle of individuality is ever lost, and no experience.