“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 we have to some extent mentioned earlier, here we have travel through probable actions, where each conceivable action is experienced. The self allows itself to change while retaining knowledge that it is the self who changes. It develops through the changes. Time can only be measured through experience. It is obvious that other gestalt personalities experience more in an equivalent amount of your time, but this is not the point.

The point is that as something that comes and goes and passes, that brings into existence and destroys, has no such reality outside of your own system. Now your own system includes not only your physical universe as you know it, but also any personalities, living or dead in your terms, who are physically oriented.

The spacious present is much more a vivid reality to those outside of your system. Your time seems marked, individually, by birth and death. When these are known for what they are, when the personality can change form at will, such quote “timing” is meaningless.

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.

It is very difficult for them to understand your ideas of past, present and future. Now give us a moment. (No real pause.) In other dimensions, or if you prefer at other stages of development, the multidimensional personality is aware of its prime identity, and is also aware simultaneously of personality offshoots that it has sent into many realities, into probable systems, as it pursues all of the probable acts and creations inherent in its nature.

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.

(During break I wondered aloud if Seth’s entity, the larger Seth personality, was listening in on Seth’s data, to pick it up effortlessly as it was being given.