The Soul and The Nature of its Perception-1
Seth/Jane Roberts
“ With the little background given so far, we can at least begin to discuss the subject of this book: The Eternal Validity Of The Soul. Even when we are exploring other issues, we will be trying to illustrate the multidimensional aspect of this inner self. There are many misconceptions connected with it, and first of all we shall try to dismiss these.
First of all, a Soul is not something that you have. It is what you are. I usually use the term “entity” in preference to the term “Soul,” simply because those particular misconceptions are not so connected with the word ”entity,” and its connotations are less religious in an organizational sense.
The trouble is that you frequently consider the Soul or entity as a finished, static “thing” that belongs to you but is not you. The Soul or entity—in other words, your most intimate powerful inner identity—is and must be forever changing. It is not, therefore, something like a cherished heirloom. It is alive, responsive, curious. It forms the flesh and the world that you know, and it is in a state of becoming.
Now in three dimensional reality in which your ego has its main focus, becoming presupposes arrival, or a destination—an ending to that which has been in a state of becoming. But the Soul or entity has its existence in other dimensions, and in these, fulfillment is not dependent upon arrivals at any points, spiritual or otherwise.
The Soul or entity is always in a state of flux, or learning, and of developments that have to do with subjective experience rather than with time and space. This is not nearly as mysterious as it might sound. Each of my readers plays a game in which the egotistical conscious self pretends not to know what the whole self definitely does know. Since the ego is definitely part of the whole self, then it must necessarily be ware of such knowledge. In its intense focus in physical reality, however, it pretends not to know, until it feels able to utilize the information in physical terms.
You do have access to the inner self, therefore. You are hardly cut off from your own Soul or entity. The ego prefers to consider itself the captain at the helm, so to speak, since it is the ego who most directly deals with the sometimes tumultuous seas of physical reality, and it does not want to be distracted from this task.
Channels, psychological and psychic, always exist, sending communications back and forth through the various channels of the self, and the ego accepts necessary information and data from the inner portions of the personality without question. Its position in fact depends in a large manner upon this unquestioning acceptance of the inner data. The ego, in other words, the exterior self that you think of as yourself—that portion of you maintains its safety and its seeming command precisely because the inner layers of your own personality constantly uphold it, keep the physical body operating, and maintain communications with the multitudinous stimuli that come both from outside conditions and inside conditions. The Soul or entity is not diminished but expanded through reincarnations, through existence and experience in probable realities—something I will explain later.
It is only because you have a highly limited conception of your own entity that you insist on its being almost sterile in its singularity. There are millions of cells within your body, but you call your body a unit, and consider it your own. You do form it, from the inside out, and yet you form it from living substance, and each smallest particle has its own living consciousness. There are clumps of matter, and in that respect they are clumps of consciousness, each individual, with their own destiny and abilities and potentials. There are no limitations to your own entity: therefore, how can your entity or Soul have boundaries, for boundaries would enclose it and deny it freedom.
Now: Often it seems that the Soul is thought of a precious stone, to be finally presented as a gift to God, or considered as some women used to consider their virginity—something highly prized that must be lost; the losing of it being signified as a fine gift to the receiver.
In many philosophies this sort of idea is retained—the Soul being returned to a primal giver, or being dissolved in a nebulous state somewhere between being and nonbeing. The Soul is, however, first of all creative. It can be discussed from many viewpoints. Its characteristics can be given to some degree, and indeed most of my readers could find out these characteristics for themselves if they were highly enough motivated ,and if this was their main concern. 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 such a degree quite unbelievable to you. It contains potentials unlimited, but it must work out its own identity and form its own worlds. It carries within it the burden of all being. Within it are personality potentials beyond your comprehension. Remember, this is your own Soul or entity that I am speaking of, as well as Soul or entity in general. You are one manifestation of your own Soul. How many of you would want to limit your reality, your entire reality, to the experience you now know? You do this when you imagine that your present self is your entire personality, or insist that your identity be maintained unchanged through an endless eternity.
Such an eternity would be dead indeed. In many ways the Soul is an incipient God, and later in this book we will discuss the “God concept.” For now, however, we will simply be concerned with the entity or Soul, the larger self that whispers even now in the hidden recesses of each readers experience. I hope in this book not only to assure you of the eternal validity of your Soul or entity, but to sense its vital reality within yourself. First of all, however, you must have some idea of your own psychological and psychic structure. When you understand to some extent who and what you are, then I can explain more clearly who and what I am. I hope to acquaint you with those deeply creative aspects of your own being, so that you can use these to extend and expand your entire experience.
Many individuals imagine the Soul to be an immortalized ego, forgetting that the ego we know it is only a small portion of the self; so this section of the personality is simply projected onward, ad infinitum, so to speak. Because the dimensions of your reality are so little understood, your concepts are bound to be limited. In considering “immortality,” mankind seems to hope for further egotistical development, and yet he objects to the idea that such development might involve change. He says through his religions that he has a Soul indeed, without even asking what a Soul is, and often regard it, again as an object in his possession.
Now personality, even as you know it, constantly changes, and not always in ways that are anticipated—most often, in fact in unpredictable ways. You insist upon focusing your attention upon the similarities that are woven through your own behavior; and upon these you build a theory that the self follows a pattern that you, instead, have transposed upon it. And the transposed pattern prevents you from seeing the self as it really is. Therefore, you also project this distorted viewpoint upon your conception of the reality of the Soul. You think of the Soul, therefore, in the light of erroneous conceptions that you hold regarding even the nature of your mortal selves.
Even the mortal self, you see, is far more miraculous and wondrous than you perceive, and possesses more abilities than you ascribe to it. You do not understand as yet the true nature of perception, even as far as the mortal self is concerned, and therefore you can hardly understand the perceptions of the Soul. For the Soul, above all, perceives and creates. Remember again that you are the Soul now. The Soul within you, therefore, is now perceiving. Its methods of perception are the same now as they were before your physical birth, and as they will be after your physical death. So basically the inner portion of you, the Soul-stuff, will not suddenly change its methods of perception nor its characteristics after physical death.
You can find what the Soul is now, therefore. It is not something waiting for you at your death, nor is it something you must save or redeem, and it is something you cannot lose. The term, “to lose or save your Soul,” has been grossly misinterpreted and distorted, for it is the part of you that is indeed indestructible. We will go into this particular matter in a portion of the book dealing with religion and the God concept.
Your own personality as you know it, that portion of you that you consider most precious, most uniquely you, will also never be destroyed or lost. It is a portion of the Soul. It will not be gobbled by the Soul, nor erased by it, nor subjugated by it; nor on the other hand can it ever be separated. It is nevertheless , only one aspect of your Soul. Your individuality , in what ever way you think of it, continues to exist in your terms.
It continues to grow and develop, but its growth and development is highly dependent upon its realization that while it is distinct and individual, it is also but one manifestation of the Soul. To the extant that it realizes this, it learns to unfold in creativity, and to those abilities that lie inherent within it.
Now unfortunately, it would be easier simply to tell you that your individuality continues to exist, and let it go at that. While this would make a fairly reasonable parable, it has been told in that particular way before, and there are dangers in the very simplicity of the tale. The truth is that the personality you are now and the personality that you have been and will be—in the terms you understand time—all of these personalities are manifestations of the Soul, of your Soul.
Your Soul therefore—the Soul that you are—the Soul that you are a part of—that Soul is a far more creative and miraculous phenomenon than you previously supposed. And when this is not clearly understood, and when the concept is watered down for simplicity’s sake as mentioned earlier, then the intense vitality of the Soul can never be understood. Your Soul, therefore, possesses the wisdom, information, and knowledge that is part of your 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, 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 simply as possible, more than the sum of its parts.
Now there are no closed systems in reality. In your physical system the nature of your perceptions limits your idea of reality to some extent, because you purposely decide to focus within a given “locale.” But basically speaking, consciousness can never be a closed system, and all barriers of such a nature are illusion. Therefore the Soul itself is not a closed system. When you consider the Soul, however, you usually think of it in such a light—unchanging, a psychic or spiritual citadel. But citadels not only keep out invaders, they also prevent expansion and development.
There are many matters here very difficult to express in words, for you are so afraid for your sense of identity that you resist the idea that the Soul, for an example is an open spiritual system, a powerhouse of creativity that shoots out in all directions—and yet this is indeed the case.
I tell you this, and at the same time remind you that your present personality is never lost. Now another word for the Soul is entity. You see it is not a simple matter of giving you a definition of a Soul or entity, For even to have a glimpse in logical terms you would have to understand it in spiritual, psychic and electromagnetic terms, and understand the basic nature of the Soul or entity, and in many ways intuitive knowledge is superior to any other kind.
One prerequisite for such an intuitive understanding of the Soul is the desire to achieve it. If the desire is strong enough, then you will be automatically lead to experiences that will result in vivid, unmistakable subjective knowledge. There are methods that will enable you to do this and I will give you some toward the end of this book.
For now, here is one quite effective but simple exercise. Close your eyes after having read this chapter to this point, and try to sense within yourself the source of power from which your own breathing and life force comes from. Some of you will do this successfully at your first try. Others may take longer. When you feel within yourself this source, then try to sense this power flow outward through your entire physical being, through the fingertips and toes, through the pores of your body, all directions, with yourself as center. Imagine the rays undiminished, reaching then through the foliage and clouds above, through the center of the Earth below, extending even to the farthest reaches of the universe.
Now I do not mean this to be merely a symbolic exercise , for though it may begin with imagination, it is based on fact, and emanations from your consciousness and the creativity of your Soul do indeed reach outward in that manner. The exercise will give you some idea of the true nature, creativity, and vitality of the Soul from which you draw your own energy and of which you are an individual and unique portion.
Now: This discussion is not meant to be an esoteric presentation with little practical meaning in your daily lives. The fact is that while you hold limited concepts of your own reality, then you cannot practically take advantage of many abilities that are your own; and while you have a limited concept of the Soul, then to some extent you cut yourself off from the source of your own being and creativity.
Now these abilities operate whether you know it or not, but often they operate in spite of you rather than with your conscious cooperation; and often when you do find yourself using them, you become frightened, disorientated, or confused. No matter what you have been taught, you must understand, for example, that basically speaking, perceptions are not physical in the way the term is usually used. If you catch yourself perceiving information through other than your physical senses, then you must accept the fact that this is the way perception works.
What often happens is that your conception of reality is so limited that you take fright whenever you perceive any experience that does not fit into your conception. Now I am not speaking merely of abilities loosely called “extrasensory perception.” These experiences seem extraordinary to you only because you have for so long denied the existence of any perception that did not come through the physical senses.
So-called extrasensory perception gives you but a crude and distorted idea of the basic ways in which the inner self receives information, but the concepts built around extrasensory perception are at least nearer to the truth, and as such represent an improvement over the idea that all perception is basically physical.
Now it is nearly impossible to separate a discussion of the nature of the Soul from a discussion of the nature of perception. Very briefly let us review a few points: you form physical matter and the physical world that you know. The physical senses 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. Using the physical senses, you can perceive reality in no other way.
This physical perception in no way alters the native, basic, unfettered perception that is characteristic of the inner self, the inner self being the portion of the Soul that is within you. The inner self knows its relationship with the Soul. It is a portion of the self that acts, you might say, as a messenger between the soul and the present personality. You must also realize that while I use the terms like “soul,’ or “entity,” “inner self,” and “present personality,” I do so only for the sake of convenience, for one is the part of the other; there is no point where one begins and another ends.
You can see this easily for yourself if you consider the way in which psychologists use the terms “ego,” “subconscious,” and even “unconscious.” What seems subconscious in one instant may be conscious the next. An unconscious motive may also be conscious at one point. Even in these terms your experience should tell you that the words themselves make divisions that do not exist in your own experience.
You seem to perceive exclusively through your physical senses, and yet you have only to extend your egotistical idea of reality, and you will find even your egotistical self accepting quite readily the existence of nonphysical information.
As it does, so its own ideas of its own nature will automatically change and expand, for you will have removed limitations to its growth. Now any act of perception changes the perceiver, and so the Soul, considered as a perceiver, must also change. There are no real divisions between the perceiver and the thing seemingly perceived. In many ways the thing being perceived is an extension of the perceiver. This may seem strange, but all acts are mental, or if you prefer, psychic acts. This is an extremely simple explanation; but the thought creates the reality. Then the creator of the thought perceives the object, and he does not understand the connection between him and this seemingly separate thing.
This characteristic of materializing thoughts and emotions into physical realities is an attribute of the Soul. Now in your reality, these thoughts are made physical. In other realities, they may be constructed in an entirely different fashion. So your Soul, that which you are, constructs your physical daily reality for you from the nature of your thoughts and expectations.
You can readily see, therefore, how important your subjective feeling really are. This knowledge—that your universe is idea construction—can immediately give you clues that enable you to change your environment and circumstances beneficially. When you do not understand the nature of the Soul, and do not realize that your thoughts and feelings form physical reality. Then you feel powerless to change it. In later chapters of this book, I hope to give you some practical information that will enable you to alter practically the very nature and structure of daily life.”
Seth Speaks
The Eternal Validity of The Soul
Jane Roberts/ Robert Butts
Amber-Allen Publishing, 1994
Pages 70-80