“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The same thing with variations happened with your own race, and for that matter is happening. In the past as you think of it historically, several groups experimented along those lines. At those times the individual consciousness became so entranced with its own experiences, however, that the clear-cut, steady, and conscious communication with the mass consciousness went underground, so to speak. It became available to those who looked for it, but the same kinds of psychological organization did not result on those occasions.²

The I-structure arises from the inner self, formed about various interests, abilities, and drives. Selections are made as to the areas of concentration. You rarely find a person who is a great intellect, a great athlete, and also a person of deep emotional and spiritual understanding — an ideal prototype of what it seems mankind could produce.

(Long pause, one of many.) All consciousness, in all of its forms, exists at once. It is difficult, without appearing to contradict myself, to explain. Go back to our bulb and flower. In basic terms they exist at once. In your terms, however, it is as if the flower-to-be, from its “future” calls back to the bulb and tells it how to make the flower. Memory operates backward and forward in time. The flower — calling back to the bulb, urging it “ahead” and reminding it of its (probable future) development — is like a future self in your terms, or a more highly advanced self, who has the answers and can indeed be quite practically relied upon. The gods can be seen in the same light, only on a larger scale; and understood in that context, they can be relied upon. It is almost a natural tendency to personify the gods while you are caught up in limited ideas of personhood. Larger concepts of personhood will indeed lead you to some glimpse of the truly remarkable gestalts of consciousness from which you constantly emerge.

5. This “margin of safety” between my mother and me is beautifully illustrated in my dream of two nights ago. And as if to further reassure my conscious mind, I saw my mother with people who were still “living”; this has been the case in other recent dream experiences I’ve had with her. Here’s the relevant portion of the description I wrote for Through My Eyes: “Then I saw my mother [Stella] between my brother Linden and his wife, all separated each from the other a little bit, all walking obliquely toward me across a featureless plain. Everything was in brilliant color. The three figures were cut off at their waists, as though I saw them on a screen. My mother didn’t speak to me or look directly at me; like the others, she faced just past my left shoulder.