Here are some interesting quotes from Seth Speaks, by Jane Roberts, interpreted in light of some of the ideas explored on this blog. All quotes are from Chapter 6.
As I'm sure most readers know, "Seth" was an entity channeled by Jane Roberts. The channeled material mainly involves issues like the nature of reality, the role of consciousness, and the potentialities of the soul.
A video of Roberts channeling Seth can be viewed here.
Seth tells us:
The soul or entity is itself the most highly motivated, most highly energized, and most potent consciousness-unit known in any universe. It is energy concentrated to a degree quite unbelievable to you.
You are one manifestation of your own soul.
Many individuals imagine the soul to be an immortalized ego, forgetting that the ego as you know it is only a small portion of the self.
Your soul, therefore, possesses the wisdom, information, and knowledge that is part of the experience of all these other personalities; and you have within yourselves access to this information, but only if you realize the true nature of your reality. Let me emphasize again that these personalities exist independently within and are a part of the soul, and each of them are free to create and develop.
There is however an inner communication, and the knowledge of one is available to any – not after physical death, but now in your present moment. Now the soul itself, as mentioned earlier, is not static. It grows and develops even through the experience of those personalities that compose it, and it is, to put it as simply as possible, more than the sum of its parts.
Now in terms of psychology as you understand it, the soul could be considered as a prime identity that is in itself a gestalt of many other individual consciousnesses – an unlimited self that is yet able to express itself in many ways and forms and yet maintain its own identity, its own "I am-ness," even while it is aware that it's I-am-ness may be part of another I-am-ness.
This ties in nicely with my post "The Diamond," in which I described a meditative exercise. Here's what I wrote:
I was shown an image of a diamond, brilliant and multifaceted. But this was no ordinary diamond. It was alive. The facets, which were far more luminous than any real-life diamond's, were in constant motion. They were constantly shifting positions like the pieces of a mosaic, creating patterns that were intricate and harmonious. It did not appear that there was anything random about these patterns; rather, they seemed to involve the working-out of some larger scheme, much in the way that notes of music can be used to work out the themes and melodies of a musical composition.
I was told that this diamond was my true soul, and that the individual facets were merely contributing elements. The real me, the eternal me, was the diamond as a whole, even though I wasn't aware of it in everyday life.
These living and moving facets each represented some persona that my larger soul had adopted – presumably in some previous (or perhaps future) earthly incarnation. The sum total of all these facets made up the diamond itself.
Let me expand on this a little. The diamond could be seen as the so-called "group soul" often discussed by metaphysical writers. But I was given to understand that the "group soul" is something of a misnomer, because actually we are talking only about a group of personae; the diamond/soul itself is our own personal soul in its purest and highest form. To think of it as a group soul is to imagine that our individual self is just one of the facets of the diamond, when in fact our soul consists of all the facets and more, because it includes the core of the diamond as well. Thus we are much greater, much more all-encompassing, than we might think.
What was most strongly impressed on me was the sheer beauty of the soul. It seemed to me that this soul was the most beautiful and precious thing in the world. Of course, I'm not just talking about my own soul, but about any human soul. The impression I had – and this is where the emotional impact came in – was that if we could only grasp the magnificence and perfection of our own souls, we would have a whole new perspective on life, and negative things (such as the illness I was experiencing) would pale into insignificance.
Again, while I cannot really convey the feeling I got, I came away with an extraordinarily strong impression that our soul – mine, or yours, or anyone's – is an object of exquisite beauty, unfathomable complexity, and ultimate perfection. Even the flaws that we perceive in ourselves are not really flaws, but elements necessary to a larger harmonious whole.
There are many wonderful things in our physical reality, including stars and galaxies, but the impression I got was that each of us, inasmuch as we represent this diamond-like perfection of the soul, is a far more wondrous and valuable thing than any physical object.
Going back to Seth, he continues:
You form physical matter and the physical world that you know. The physical senses actually can be said to create the physical world, in that they force you to perceive an available field of energy in physical terms, and impose a highly specialized pattern upon this field of reality.
There are no real divisions between the perceiver and the things seemingly perceived. In many ways the thing perceived is an extension of the perceiver. This may seem strange, but all acts are mental, or if you prefer, psychic acts.
Your universe is idea construction.
The world that you know is one of the infinite materializations taken by consciousness, and as such it is valid.
The soul's perceptions are not dependent upon time, because time is a physical camouflage and does not apply to nonphysical reality.
This seems to tie in reasonably well with the whole M-space/N-space thing that I've been exploring lately. N-space, the information matrix, is "the available field of energy" that each mind "perceive[s] … in physical terms." M-space is a kind of reality bubble created by the mind, and therefore "there are no real divisions between the perceiver and the things seemingly perceived," and "all acts are mental." Since every person has his own M-space, "the world that you know is one of the infinite materializations taken by consciousness, and as such it is valid." Space and time are properties of M-space but not of N-space (at least not in the same way), so "time is a physical camouflage and does not apply to nonphysical reality," i.e., to N-space.
I'm not saying Seth's ideas line up perfectly with the ones we've been looking at, but there are some correspondences.
I also wrote up some notes yesterday that may be of interest. I was inspired, in part, by Matt Rouge's comment in earlier thread that an individual personality consists of information and "the I-thought," the latter referring to awareness as such.
Anyway, here's what I jotted down (slightly edited for clarity):
The ego is a constellation of memories, beliefs, and personality traits, all of which can be understood as data or reducible to data. The higher self, by contrast, is awareness or the I-thought.
Facets of the higher self incarnate and acquire ego identification, which persists indefinitely. A given facet ordinarily does not reincarnate. Perhaps in special cases it does – for instance, after a sudden violent death, when the ego feels cheated of a full incarnational experience. The reincarnation of an ego would probably involve wiping the slate clean, which would amount to personal annihilation as far as the ego is concerned, although the higher self would not be affected. Ordinarily, therefore, it is another facet of the higher self that incarnates, but this facet may carry traces of an ego's life experiences because of intra-self communication, something like phase entanglement in quantum physics (by analogy only).
The postmortem ego is always "in" the afterlife, so it can be contacted by mediums even if another facet of the self has incarnated bearing some traces of that ego.
The ego's M-space is consistent, so the sense of having a body is consistent as well. But M-space can be altered more easily after death, as in the example of Howard Storm's near-death experience, in which his M-space was altered by an act of will. The same is probably true of out-of-body experiences, which are explorations of other M-space options.
The egos continue to develop and to acquire a greater sense of the whole. A so-called "group soul" may be a collection of facets within the self. Not necessarily all the facets, just some of them.
The higher self is a dynamic system, evolving in terms of individual egos/facets, group soul(s), and the self as a whole, and the higher self is undoubtedly in communication with other higher selves, perhaps comprising a larger group soul, like nested dolls.
Since the word "ego" has a negative connotation, and since "higher self" is a bit confusing, it might be good to use different terms.
The ego could be the "constructed self."
The higher self could be the "total self" or "oversoul."
A facet that has not yet incarnated could be a "potential self," or (to use plant imagery) a "bud."