“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Now, you are not speaking of basic issues,” he said. “You are flying paper dragons to be punctured, but these are not the real dragons. You must learn to listen to the voice of the inner self. It is hardly to be feared. You have allowed the ego to become a counterfeit self, and you take its word because you will not hear the muffled voice that is within it.

Again, Seth stared at “the Dean,” but now he spoke to the others in the group. “In the spontaneous working of your nervous system, what do we find? We see here the head of ‘the Dean’ that rests upon his shoulders, and the intellect that demands discipline. And yet all of this rests upon the spontaneous workings of the inner self, and the nervous system of which the intellect knows little. And without that spontaneous discipline, there would be no ego to sit upon the shoulders and demand discipline. . . . Now that I have proven how jovial I am, you may all take a break.”

“The complicated human personality with its physical structure has evolved, along with some other structures, a highly differentiated ‘I’ consciousness [the ego, in other words], whose very nature is such that it attempts to preserve the apparent boundaries of identity. To do so it chooses between actions. But beneath this sophisticated gestalt are the simpler foundations of its being, and indeed the very acceptance of all stimuli without which identity would be impossible.

“Now all of this is basic knowledge if you would understand why the personality accepts even an impeding action such as illness despite the ego’s resistence to pain.”