“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Because you identify your experience with the regular line of consciousness with which you are familiar, you are rarely able to “bring in” any “other-self” material and hold it while retaining your own sense of identity. Such material may at times bleed or intrude into your own thought, where it blends and is not recognized. In such cases, it takes on the coloration of your own thought patterns. It adds to the overall atmosphere of your being. Without understanding or training, you would have to “lose” your own consciousness in order to perceive the “other-consciousness.”

There is a correlation here with something Ruburt said in [ESP] class last evening. He said that writing can be, first, a method of standing apart from life to some extent — in order to capture life, and preserve the unutterable uniqueness of any given day. But, he said, you can then discover that the writing itself becomes the day’s experience. You are then “lost” in the writing as much as you feared being lost in normal living, with no way to step aside and view the experience. My addition, now, to those remarks is this: You would need the creation then of another “self,” who stood aside from the writing self in order to preserve the original intent.

Now: In the same way you could not, practically speaking, experience such other-consciousness (with a hyphen) unless you learned to stand somewhat aside, like the writer in Ruburt’s remarks. Period. But even if you did, the very experience of other-consciousness itself would supersede your living space. You would need another self, able to hold both lines of consciousness at once, lost in neither but maintaining footing in each. This would be a very difficult achievement in normal life in any sustained fashion.

That identity would contain the you that you have always known, and in no way threaten it. The new you would simply be more than you are now. You would just have another expansion of consciousness, another self-who-is-aware-of-being in the same way that — using an analogy, granted — the writer is aware of the self who lives, in those terms; is the self who lives while being in a position of some apartness, able to comment upon the life being lived.

Now in a very small way, admittedly, that analogy hints at the kind of deeper events that occur as selves are born out of selves to operate in various levels of activity. In the case of entities, each such self dwells entirely in its own dimension or system of reality.

Now (quietly): In the waking state you would find such an experience highly threatening without some suitable preparation — and I must be very cautious in my treatment of your concepts of the self and your ideas of one-personhood.⁴

I am not speaking of you personally, Joseph, so much as I am emphasizing that the race at present identifies its individual being with highly limited concepts of the self. Those ideas are vigorously protected, and indeed must be understood and given honor even while attempts are made to expand them. Period. Certainly the quality of consciousness has changed through the centuries in many different ways, and sometimes in what would appear to be contradictory ones; but in your present you have nothing against which to compare your current consciousness of experience.

Give us a moment … (Still in trance, Jane lit a cigarette.) Your stratified concepts of one-personhood overlook all such inherent differences, however, and you have a tendency to transpose your own concepts whenever you come in contact with those whose ideas you cannot understand. Even now in some “tribal societies,” for example, the self is experienced far differently; so that, while so-called individuality as you understand it is maintained, each self is also experienced as a part of others in the tribe, and the natural environment. To some, this seems to mean that individuality is stillborn or undeveloped. You protect your ideas of selfhood at all costs — even against the evidence of nature, which shows you that all are related.

Uniqueness, private experience, and individuality attain their dimensions of being and their true grandeur only when the inherent relationships among all elements of being are understood. You fight against your own greater individuality, and the spacious dimensions of your own being, when you overprotect your ideas of selfhood by limiting the experience of the self.

“As a dream self I’m sitting in my living room with a friend, Stephen, when suddenly self-knowledge, connections among events, symbols, and the inner logic and fabric of my life and experience became crystal clear. They begin piling up in a strange way, like cell on cell, or lines of freight cars crashing into each other just outside my awareness. It’s as though my dream self can handle only so much at once, and the stuff heaps up, and I get up and walk to the kitchen. ‘What’s going on?’ Stephen asks me, but all I can say is that I’m on the edge of a bursting. I don’t have time to explain further.

“As I walk into the kitchen the head of my dream self fills with vivid scenes, like other dreams, interpretations of each cell of this new awareness. I project all of this outward around me into literally hundreds of brilliant scenes; expressions, I knew, of probabilities, ‘past’ and ‘future’ events, sideways events I can’t even understand … all happening at once, with perfect comprehension of that by the ‘anchor’ dream self. I feel that while all of this is still coming from this anchor self, the selves in these dreams are equally as focused — each of them being dream selves, existing in their universes, and with each of their own connections expanding outwards in much the same way that mine do. I literally become the experience of being myself contained in all of these selves, while being these selves contained by me. In at least one of these selves, the knowledge of this entire event comes to consciousness like a half-recalled dream of its own, and the experience of recalling and being recalled is like liquid electricity in me, the anchor self.

And this is the place to mention one of those happy analogies that I’m able to make occasionally (even though in this case it took me several months after I’d had my own little double dream to come up with the very obvious association) — for in our reality, the double or multiple dream happening offers at least a pale insight into the numerous lives that, according to Seth, our entity or whole self experiences simultaneously.