“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 feelings and sensations give rise to the questions, to the thoughts, to the intellect. The child in a fashion feels — feels — its own thoughts rise from a relative psychological invisibility into immediate, vital formation. There is a process there that you have forgotten. The child identifies with its own psychic reality first of all — then discovers its feelings, and claims those, and discovers its thoughts and intellect, and claims those (all quite intently).

The child first explores the components of its psychological environment, the inside stuff of subjective knowledge, and claims that inner territory, but the child does not identify its basic being with either its feelings or its thoughts. That is why, for example, it often seems that young children can die so easily. (Still intently): They can disentangle themselves because they have not as yet identified their basic beings with life experience. Period.

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.

One of the intellect’s main purposes is to give you a conscious choice in a world of probabilities. To do that properly the intellect is to make clear, concise decisions, on its level, of matters that are its concern, and therefore to present its own picture of reality to add to the entire construct. (Long pause.) On the one hand you have been told to identify yourselves almost completely with your intellects. On the other hand, you have been taught that the intellect, the “flower of consciousness,” is a frail, vulnerable adjunct — again, a chance creation, without meaning and without support — without support because you believe that “beneath it” lie “primitive, animalistic, bloody instincts,” against which reason must exert what strength it has.

(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.