“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“At a time when your thoughts veered off on a tangent. I believe you had a mental image of the inside portion of a human body, or a thought having to do with inner organs. This occurred as you picked up, on deeper levels, the presence of Dr. Pietra.”

“Action is action whether or not you perceive it, and probable events are events whether or not you perceive them. Thoughts are also events, as are wishes and desires. The human system responds as fully to these as it does to physical events. In dreams, often portions of probable events are experienced in a semiconscious manner. This amounts to a bleed-through, and I use the term purposely, for your tape recorder can be used as an analogy.

“Imagine the whole self as composed of some master tape. Your recorder has four channels. We will give our recorder numberless channels. Each one represents a portion of the whole self, each existing in a different dimension, yet all a part of the whole self [or tape]. You see it would be ridiculous to say that Mono One on your tape was any more or less valid than Mono Two. Mono One could be compared to your present ego.

“Until the whole self is thus able to perceive its own parts simultaneously, then these seemingly separate portions appear to themselves isolated and alone. There is communication between them, but they are not aware of it. The tape is the element common to all channels. Now the inner ego is the director, but the whole self (or soul) must know itself. It is not enough that the inner ego knows what is going on. Ultimately the inner ego must bring about comprehension on the parts of the simultaneous selves.

“Each portion of the whole self must become aware of the other parts. We are not dealing with anything as simple as a recorder, of course, for our tapes [selves] are constantly changing. …”

“Take, for example, Event X. This probable event will be experienced by the various portions of the self in their own way. When it is experienced by your ego, it is a physical event. When it is perceived by other portions of the self, the ego does not know of it.

“Now the inner ego, as you know, exists in the Spacious Present. The Spacious Present is the basic ‘time’ in which the whole self exists, but the various portions of the self have their experiences in their own time systems.

“The ego maintains much of its stability by looking backward into a ‘past’ and finding something of itself there. The portions of the self that deal in probabilities do not have experience with a ‘past’ to give them a sense of identity or continuity. Permanence, as the ego thinks of it, would be an alien concept to these portions of the self, and highly distasteful, adding up to rigidity.

“Flexibility is the key word here, a voluntary changing of the self as it is allowed to explore each probability. Experience is of a plastic nature. The basic sense of identity here is carried by what you could compare to the subconscious that you know. In other words, it is this portion of the psychological structure that carries the burden of identity, and it is the ego whose experiences are of a dreamlike nature.”

“You may dream of holding an apple, for example, and awaken to find it gone. This does not mean that it did not exist, but in the waking state you do not perceive it. In the same way you do not perceive the actuality of probable events on a conscious basis. A portion of your whole self is quite involved in these probable events, however. The I of your dreams can be legitimately compared to the self that experiences probable events. [That I would consider itself fully conscious and view the waking I as the probable self.]

“The package of experience upon which you can focus is indeed composed of many small packages, but the whole package of reality is much larger than this. A portion of the self can and does experience events in an entirely different fashion [than the ego does] and this portion goes off on a different tangent. For when your conscious self perceives Event X, this other part of the self branches off, so to speak, into all the other probable events that could have been experienced by the ego.

“The ego must choose one event because of its limitations. But this other portion of the self can and does delve into what you could call Event Xl, X2, X3, et cetera. It can pursue and experience all of these alternative events in the same amount of physical time that it takes for the ego to experience Event X alone.

“This is not as farfetched as it might seem. The shaking of a hand may be perceived by you as a simple action. You are not aware of the million small acts which make up this seemingly insignificant action. They exist nevertheless. It does not take you time to perceive them one by one. You perceive them in their completed fashion. Now this portion of the self experiences these probable events consciously, with as much rapidity as you subconsciously perceive the million small actions that make up the handshake.”

“These portions of the self simply operate in a different dimension of reality, with different fields of activity. In this particular instance, compare the various portions of the whole self to the various members of a family: The man may work in the city. The woman may work at their home in the country. Of three children, each may attend a different school. They are all members of the same family unit and operate out of the same house. There is no basic reason why any of the children could not spend his days at his father’s office, but he would not be able to understand the events or activities there.

“There is within the family a general realization of the experiences of its members, but these are secondhand except for those events shared by the family as a whole, as a unit. There is also a generalized intuitional knowledge on the part of any portion of the self as to the experiences of the other portions.

“These other probable events become just as ‘real’ within other dimensions. As a sideline, there are some interesting episodes when a severe psychological shock or deep sense of futility causes a short circuit so that one portion of the self begins to experience one of its other probable realities. I am thinking in particular of some cases of amnesia where the victim ends up suddenly in a different town with another name, occupation, and no memory of his own past. In some instances such an individual is experiencing a probable event, but he must experience it, you see, within his own time system.”