“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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 at 9:57.) Let those who will, laugh at tales of spirits turning into the trees⁵ — a simplistic theory, certainly, yet a symbolic statement in such societies: The dead were buried at home in the same close territory, to form in later times the very composition of the ground upon which religions grew. Again, your limited concepts of selfhood make what I am saying difficult for you to perceive.

[...] You like to think — again — that only your own species possesses an awareness of its own selfhood. There are different kinds of selfhood, and an infinite variety of ways to experience self-awareness.

[...] There is as yet no method of communication that can allow you to perceive their concepts of selfhood, or their [collective] vision of existence. [...] They simply represent a different kind of selfhood.

[...] Particularly without offending your ideas of selfhood — yet each of you “alive” died in just such a manner.

[...] Yet it is vital that you throw aside old concepts of the self and of the soul before you can begin to understand the freedom of your own selfhood.

[...] (Long pause, one of many.) In the reckoning that you accept, the species in its infancy obviously experienced selfhood in different terms from your own. [...]

[...] Early man did not feel like an empty shell, and yet selfhood existed for him as much outside of the body as within it. [...]

[...] A person, then, looking out into the world of trees, waters and rock, wildlife and vegetation, literally felt that he or she was looking at the larger, materialized, subjective areas of personal selfhood.

Human capabilities will be seen as what they are, and a great new period of development will occur, in which all concepts of selfhood and reality will be literally seen as “primitive superstition.” The species will actually move into a new kind of selfhood.

[...] You begin to feel threatened, determined to uphold your old ideas of selfhood. [...]

[...] However, many of my readers, or their offspring, will be involved in a new dimension of selfhood in which consciousness is fully explored and the potentials of the soul uncovered, at least to some extent.

Now, you squeeze the great fruit of your selfhood into a tiny uneasy pulp, unaware of the sweetness of its juices or the variety of its seasons. [...]

[...] Birth is experienced in terms of self-discovery, and includes the sensation of selfhood gently rising and unfolding from the secret heart of the universe.

[...] For now, I simply want to make the point that in the most basic of terms the human birth is as orderly and spontaneous as the birth of any of nature’s creatures — and a child opens its selfhood even as a flower opens its petals.

Your present existence, however, is highly related to those other levels of selfhood. Now what happens at the top of the mountain affects all that goes on below, and so everything that you do affects those other realms of selfhood, and there is an interchange that occurs constantly. [...]

[...] To discover it you look “down” through the levels of your own being, there to find the layers of selfhood that in your world represent the past history of yourself, from which you emerged. [...]

[...] A reality of selfhood, an idea not yet materialized in the unformed future, reaches down into the past and brings that future into realization. [...]

(With gestures, emphatically) That selfhood jumps in leapfrog fashion over events that it does not want to actualize (pause), and does not admit such experience into its selfhood. Other portions of your greater identity, however, do accept those same events rejected by you, and form their own selfhoods.

[...] As in your terms the cavemen ventured out into the daylight of the earth, there is a time for man to venture out into a greater knowledge of his subjective reality, comma, to explore the dimensions of selfhood and go beyond the small areas of himself in which he has thus far found shelter.

This obviously does not mean that there are not entities whose selfhood is completely apart from your own. [...]

[...] In fact, that portion has its own name and selfhood and is master of its own castle, so to speak.

The experience of any given unit, constantly changing, affects all other units … Give us time … It is difficult to explain because your concepts of selfhood are so limited … These units contain within themselves, in your terms, all “latent” identities, but not in a predetermined fashion. [...]

[...] The limited I-structure that you presently identify with selfhood is simply not capable of fully using all of those characteristics.

These are emotional and psychological beings of such richness that your concepts of selfhood force you to dilute them to a degree that you can understand.⁴ Each of your persons is a part of that greater personhood. [...]

Recognized concepts of the self are the ego’s interpretation of selfhood. [...]

(A one-minute pause at 11:20.) While you were so concerned with protecting what you thought of as the boundaries and integrity of one selfhood, as a race you actually arrived at a point where you were beginning to deny your own greater reality. [...]

Where your physical survival, in those terms, once depended upon a narrowed focus while you learned physical manipulation, now the success of that manipulation necessitates a broadening of focus — a new awakening into the larger existence of the selfhood, with what will be a corresponding rerecognition of neurological activity that is now only briefly sensed by some (like Jane), but present in the heritage of your corporal structure.

[...] When you move, you move into other portions of your selfhood.”

[...] You protect your ideas of selfhood at all costs — even against the evidence of nature, which shows you that all are related.

[...] 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.

[...] You worry for your physical identity and limit the extent of your perceptions for fear you cannot handle more and retain your selfhood.

[...] On the whole the species is beginning to change its psychological sense of selfhood. [...]

[...] You move in and out of probable selfhoods, while at the same time — usually with the greatest of ease — you maintain an identity of yourself. [...]

Psychic identity does not need to set up barriers in order to recognize selfhoods. [...]

Man, staying within the core of his arbitrarily designated selfhood, can in truth be compared to early physical man, cowering within his cave. [...] You have not learned to venture forth from an arbitrarily designated selfhood, into an extended environment that knows no space or time. [...]

[...] You are the physical event of yourself put into a given space and time, and because of the conditions of that framework, within it you automatically exclude other experience of your own selfhood. [...]

The next natural step would be to reassimilate those portions of the self, to acknowledge their ancient origins and abilities, to return them so that they form a new coating, as it were, or a new version of selfhood. [...]