“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We will resume dictation for now — but I always do keep your personal concerns in mind.

Dictation. You usually think of your conscious mind as your ego. It is directed toward action in physical life. Many schools of thought (long pause) seem to have the curious ideas that the ego is inferior to other portions of the self, or “selfish,” and imagine it to be definitely of a lower quality than the inner self, or the soul.

In the first place, it is really impossible to separate portions of the self, and we make such distinctions only in an effort to explain the many facets of the personality. (Long pause.) It is generally understood, then, that you do have an ego, directed toward exterior activity, and in those terms (underlined) you also have an inner ego. It is also conscious, and is the director of all automatic interior activity (emphatically).

Most people do not realize that they can indeed have access to this inner awareness. This inner ego or inner self should not be thought of as superior to your ordinary mind. It should not be thought of, really, as something separate from your ordinary mind. Your ego and your ordinary consciousness bring into focus all of your physical experiences, and make possible the brilliant preciseness of physical experience.

— condition of being. You have other kinds of existence, then. The conscious mind is one brilliant segment of your larger consciousness, but it is composed of the same universal energy and vitality that composes all consciousness. There are ways of communicating with the inner ego or inner self, however, and we will discuss some of these very shortly. It is important, again, to remember that this inner ego or inner self (long pause) uses a process that is far swifter than reasoning.

(4:38.) Your dream, Joseph, as you supposed, represented a state of mind and of confusion. It was not, for example, precognitive, but it did inform you — using images and feelings — of the picture that was sometimes painted in different terms by your conscious thoughts. Ruburt could have had the same kind of dream, for example.

(My dream Seth referred to took place yesterday morning, and was so vivid I lay awake for an hour after having it. It stayed with me all day. Because is was so vivid, it would make a great series of paintings. It obviously expressed my conscious fears about our situation, and in it I ended up lost amid old factory buildings, with the car gone. I was naked, saying, “I’ve lost my way,” to a girl, possibly a nurse, seated at a desk in a cavernous, vacant, rust-red old room. I’d even found myself exploring the town dump of Elmira — only the landscape looked volcanic, beautiful in its own way, heaped with gray fine ash like the surface of the moon, almost.)