Ego and the Personality

Seth Speaks, Session 512

Inner and Outer Ego and the Personality

… You are not a forsaken offshoot of physical matter, nor is your consciousness meant to vanish like a puff of smoke.  Instead, you form the physical body that you know at a deeply unconscious level with great discrimination, miraculous clarity, and intimate unconscious knowledge of each minute cell that composes it.  This is not meant symbolically.

Now because your conscious mind, as you think of it, is not aware of these activities, you do not identify with this inner portion of yourselves.  You prefer to identify with the part of you who watches television or cooks or works – the part you think knows what it is doing.  But this seemingly unconscious portion of yourself is far more knowledgeable, and upon its smooth functioning your entire physical existence depends.

This portion is conscious, aware, alert.  It is you, so focused in physical reality, who do not listen to its voice, who do not understand that it is the great psychological strength from which your physically oriented self springs.

I call this seemingly unconscious the “inner ego”, for it directs inner activities.  It correlates information that is perceived not through the physical senses, but through other inner channels.  It is the inner perceiver of reality that exists beyond the three-dimensional.  It carries within it the memory of each of your past existences.  It looks into subjective dimensions that are literally infinite, and from these subjective dimensions all objective realities flow.

All necessary information is given to you through these inner channels, and unbelievable inner activities take place before you can so much as lift a finger, flicker an eyelid, or read this sentence upon the page.  This portion of your identity is quite natively clairvoyant and telepathic, so that you are warned of disasters before they occur, whether or not you consciously accept the message, and all communication takes place long before a word is spoken.

The “outer ego” and the inner ego operate together, the one to enable you to manipulate in the world that you know, the other to bring you those delicate inner perceptions without which physical existence could not be maintained.

There is however a portion of you, the deeper identity who forms both the inner ego and the outer ego, who decided that you would be a physical being in this place and in this time.  This is the core of your identity, the psychic seed from which you sprang, the multidimensional personality of which you are part.

For those of you who wonder where I place the subconscious, as psychologists think of it, you can imagine it as a meeting place, so to speak, between the outer and inner egos.  You must understand that there are no real divisions to the self, however, so we speak of various portions only to make the basic idea clear.

…  The self that you know is but one fragment of your entire identity.  These fragment selves are not strung together, however, like beads of a string.  They are more like the various skins of an onion, or segments of an orange, all connected through the one vitality and growing out into various realities while springing from the same source.

I am not comparing personality to an orange or onion, but I want to emphasize that as these things grow from within outward, so does each fragment of the entire self.  You observe the outside aspect of objects.  Your physical senses permit you to perceive the exterior forms to which you then react, but your physical senses to some extent force you to perceive reality in this manner, and the inside vitality within matter and form is not so apparent.

I can tell you, for example, that there is consciousness within a nail, but few of my readers will take me seriously enough to stop in midsentence, and say good morning or good afternoon to the nearest nail they can find, stuck in a piece of wood.

Nevertheless, the atoms and molecules within the nail do possess their own kind of consciousness.  The atoms and molecules that make up the pages of this book are also, within their own level, aware.  Nothing exists – neither rock, mineral, plant, animal, or air – that is not filled with consciousness of its own kind.  So you stand amid a constant vital commotion, a gestalt of aware energy, and you are yourselves physically composed of conscious cells that carry within themselves the realization of their own identity, that cooperate willingly to form the corporeal structure that is your physical body.

I am saying, of course, that there is no such thing as dead matter.  There is no object that was not formed by consciousness, and each consciousness, regardless of its degree, rejoices in sensation and creativity.  You cannot understand what you are unless you understand such matters.

For convenience’s sake, you close out the multitudinous inner communications that leap between the tiniest parts of your flesh, yet even as physical creatures, you are to some extent a portion of other consciousness.  There are no limitations to the self.  There are no limitations to its potentials.  You can adopt artificial limitations through your own ignorance, however.  You can identify, for example, with your outer ego alone, and cut yourself off from abilities that are a part of you.  You can deny, but you cannot change, the facts.  The personality is multidimensional, even though many people hide their heads, figuratively speaking, in the sand of three-dimensional existence and pretend there is nothing more.

…  I do not mean to underestimate the outer ego.  You have simply overestimated it.  Nor has its true nature been recognized.

We will have more to say concerning this point, but for now it is enough to realize that your sense of identity and continuity is not dependent upon the ego.

Now at times I will be using the term “camouflage”, referring to the physical world to which the outer ego relates, for physical form is one of the camouflages that reality adopts.  The camouflage is real, and yet there is a much greater reality within it – the vitality that gave it form.  Your physical senses then allow you to perceive camouflage, for they are attuned to it in a highly specialized manner.  But to sense the reality within the form requires a different sort of attention, and more delicate manipulations than the physical senses provide.

The ego is a jealous god, and it wants its interests served.  It does not want to admit the reality of any dimensions except those within which it feels comfortable and can understand.  It was meant to be an aid but it has been allowed to become a tyrant.  Even so, it is much more resilient and eager to learn than is generally supposed.  It is not natively as rigid as it seems.  Its curiosity can be of great value.

If you have a limited conception of the nature of reality, then your ego will do its best to keep you in the small enclosed area of your accepted reality.  If, on the other hand, your intuitions and creative instincts are allowed freedom, then they communicate some knowledge of greater dimensions to this most physically oriented portion of your personality.