“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

New sentence: That particular blend of rational thinking with which your society is familiar takes it more or less for granted, then, that man’s identity as a species, and the identity of the individual, is first and foremost connected with the intellect. You identify yourselves with your intellect, primarily, casting aside as much as possible other equally vital elements of your personhood.

New sentence: In your historical past, when man identified his identity with the soul, he actually gave himself greater leeway in terms of psychological mobility, but eventually the concept of the soul as held resulted in a distrust of the intellect. (Pause.) That result was the inevitable follow-up of dogma. Period. Part of man’s latest over-identification with the intellect is, of course, an overreaction to those past historical events. Neither religion or science grant other creatures much subjective dimension, however: You like to think of yourselves, again, as the reasoning animal in terms of your species.

The animals possess a consciousness of self, and without the human intellect. You do not need a human intellect to be aware of your own consciousness. Animals, it is true, do not reflect upon the nature of their own identities as man does (pause), but this is because that nature is intuitively comprehended. It is self-evident.

I only want to show you that the sense of identity need not inevitably be coupled with the intellect exclusively. Your intellect is a part of you — a vital, functioning portion of your cognitive processes — but it does not contain (underlined) your identity.

Ideally, however, children finally claim their feelings and their thoughts as their own. They identify naturally with both, finding each valid and vital. By the time you are an adult, however, you have been taught to disconnect your identity from your feelings as much as possible, and to think of your personhood in terms of your intellectual orientation. Your identity seems to be in your head. Your feelings and your mental activity therefore appear, often, quite contradictory. You try to solve all problems through the use of reasoning alone.

(9:46.) Despite all of that, men and women still find the solutions to many of their problems by rediscovering the larger sense of identity¹ — a sense of identity that accepts the intuitions and the feelings, the dreams and the magic hopes as vital characteristics, not adjuncts, of personhood. When I tell you to remember your own natural persons, I do then want to remind you not to identify with your intellects alone, but to enlarge your scopes of identity. Automatically those other, often-shunted-aside characteristics begin to add their richness, fulfillment, and vitality to your lives effortlessly.