“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.

Now the time sequence, while followed physically by your animals, is psychologically experienced far differently. They are much freer. Your past, present and future does not concern them. They also have memory of the past and future, but always experienced within the context of the present; and this is quite at variance with your own experience.