“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The approach that you use in the production of art is instinctively “magical.” It is quite natural for children to play creatively with the various states of their own consciousnesses, to explore the “us-ness” of a seemingly single identity. They play at being historic known characters. They play at being trees or animals or stars. They play at being all of those things. They understand the multiplicity that resides within the idea of single personhood.

From their parents they learn to pare down the dimensions of their own practically accepted personhood. To that extent they cut themselves off from large portions of their own subjectivity. The “us-ness” of a single identity is experienced less and less. It exists, nevertheless. (Long pause.) I told you that at certain levels contradictions would certainly seem to appear, but the us-ness of the self represents an important psychic characteristic. The child’s explorations of its environment are in a fashion quite different from its later adolescent explorations of the world. A child’s curiosity goes out in all directions. In a fashion it psychologically multiplies itself as it goes. Its consciousness spreads out to include all that it perceives, while still retaining a sense of its own singularity.

(9:13.) A child may think “We will go to sleep now”—meaning quite happily that (pause) its own single consciousness also participates in the conscious life and activities of everything else in its environment, so it and the creatures of the night, say, sleep together, and waken together to greet the dawn. In such a way the child actively participates in the consciousness of nature—and I am not speaking of an imaginative or symbolic participation alone, but of an awareness of the multiplicity within itself and of other creatures.