“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In other words, your accepted concepts of selfhood would disappear if you ever allowed any significant subjective experience to intrude. “The Absent Self” — the absent or unknown self — is the portion of your own existence that you do not ordinarily perceive or accept, though there is within you a longing for it.

Much of “Unknown” Reality is involved with the breaking up of theories that have been long accepted, but that prevent you from perceiving the powerful nature of those absent portions of the self. As you focus upon certain details from a larger field of physical reality, so then you focus upon only the small portion of yourself that you consider “real.”

Give us a moment … Selfhood overspills with great luxurious outcroppings, yet you jealously guard against such creativity. To a certain extent you do carry the knowledge of your forefathers within your [cells’] chromosomes,¹ which present a pattern that is not rigid but flexible — one that in codified fashion endows you with the subjective living experience of those who, in your terms, have gone before. As Ruburt recently suspected, some very old cultures have been aware of this.² Period. While being independent individuals their members also identified with their ancestors to some extent, accepting them as portions of their selfhoods. This does not mean that the individual self was less, but was more aware of its own reality. A completely different kind of focus was presented, in which the ancestors were understood to contribute to the “new” experience of the living; one in which the physically focused consciousness clearly saw itself as perceiving the world for itself, but also for all of those who had gone before — (gradually louder for emphasis:) while realizing that in those terms he or she would contribute as well as the generations past.

The animals were also accepted in this natural philosophy of selfhood as the individual plainly saw the living quality of consciousness. The characteristics of the animals were understood to continue “life,” adding their qualities to the experience of the self in a new way.³ You had better put “life” in quotes in that last sentence.

(Pause.) The human body would be used in earth’s great husbandry as, from it, dying and decaying new forms would arise. This was a give-and-take in which, for instance, a jungle neighborhood was truly home, and all was a portion of the self psychically, spiritually, and physically.⁴

Give us a moment … Those intimate realizations, however, had to be counterbalanced in line with certain purposes set by your species, and even for that matter momentarily set aside so that other abilities and characteristics could emerge. The species’ sense of curiosity would not allow it to stay in any home territory for long,⁶ and so the sense of intimacy was purposely broken. It would become highly important again, however, when the planet was populated extensively, as it is now — only the original feeling of home area has to be extended over the face of the earth. The “absent” portions of the self are ready to emerge. The other, to you probable, lines of consciousness can now come into play.

The larger self, then, seeds itself in time. In this process no identity is lost and no identity is the same, yet all are interrelated. So you can theoretically expand your consciousness to include the knowledge of your past lives, though those lives were yours and not yours. They have a common root, as next year’s leaves have a common root with the leaves now of this plant (pointing again to the begonia).