“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 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.

So also are all neurobiological structures that depend upon a time system, as for example your own nervous system.

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.

(Pause. Smile.) My big brother does not have to tune in, you see, at the time of the session. The session exists in all time. It is available to him when he wishes the information—and he has, or is, or will (smile), take advantage of it, you see.

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.

The idleness, if prolonged, is not idleness. Concentration upon physical data takes the conscious mind off for a trip, and it gives the inner self greater freedom to initiate new developments and intuitional creations. These, incidentally, can help you understand the true nature of time. Now take your break.