In this article we will discuss the idea of the psyche, soul and oversoul in greater detail than before. Then we will move onto a seven-part discussion of reincarnation that will utilize both scientific and spiritual information.
In this article we use different terms such as psyche, soul and oversoul. It is important to remember that there are no divisions to the self. The psyche and soul are essentially two different words for the same thing. The soul and oversoul and essentially two different words for the same things. What we are dealing with is greater and greater (more expansive) aspects of our whole Selves…aspects that we will increasingly become aware of as we evolve our consciousness to higher and higher levels, always for the greatest good.
Life, Consciousness & Death
“Your life seems synonymous with your consciousness.
Therefore it appears that your knowledge of yourself grows gradually, as your self-consciousness develops from your birth.
It appears, furthermore, that your consciousness will meet a death beyond which your self-consciousness will not survive.
Most of you yearn for some private and intimate assurances, and seek for some inner certainty that your own individuality is not curtly dismissed at death.”1
What is the Psyche?
“The psyche is a gestalt of aware energy in which your own identity resides, inviolate, yet ever-changing as you fulfill your potentials.
The psyche is never destroyed.
Nor is that unique individuality of your own ever minimized.
The psyche’s experiences straddle your ideas of time, however.
I am telling you that your “life” is simply the only portion of your existence of which you are presently aware.
Existences are like notes played along certain frequencies.
You are tuned in to an earth song, following this analogy, but you are only following your own melody, and usually you are unaware of the greater orchestration in which you also take part.
Your identities are not something already completed.
Your most minute action, thought, and dream adds to the reality of your psyche, no matter how grand or austere the psyche may appear to you when you think of it as a hypothetical term.
The “true facts” are that you exist in this life and outside it simultaneously.
You are “between lives” and “in lives” at once.
The deeper dimensions of reality are such that your thoughts and actions not only affect the life you know, but also reach into all of those other simultaneous existences.
The psyche is open-ended.
No system is closed, psychological systems least of all.
Your life is a dreaming experience to other portions of your greater reality which focus elsewhere.”2
The Nature of the Psyche
“Obviously the psyche is not a thing.
It does not have a beginning or ending.
It cannot be seen or touched in normal terms.
It is useless to attempt any description of it through usual vocabulary, for your language primarily allows you to identify physical rather than nonphysical experience.
The nature of your own psyche escapes all definitions, defies all categorizing, and shoves aside with exuberant creativity all attempts to wrap it up in a neat package.
The artist knows that many pictures can be painted, and holds in mind paintings already produced and those in the planning stage as well. So the psyche holds equally lives in progress, lived or not yet lived, and deals with a greater perspective from which your ordinary perspective emerges.
You are your psyche’s living expression, its human manifestation.
Yet you allow yourselves often to become blind to brilliant aspects of your own existence.”3
The Structure of the Psyche
“The earth has a structure. In those terms, so does the psyche.
As the exterior continents rise from the inner structure of the earth, so the lands of the psyche emerge from an even greater invisible source.
The psyche, then, is not a known land.
It is not simply an alien land, to which or through which you can travel.
It is not a completed or nearly complete subjective universe already there for you to explore.
It is, instead, an ever-forming state of being, in which your present sense of existence resides.
You create it and it creates you.
When you begin your travels into your own psyche you are the wanderer, the journeyman or journey-woman – but you are also the vehicle and the environment.
You form the roads, your method of travel, the hills or mountains or oceans, as well as the hills, farms, and villages of the self, or of the psyche, as you go along.
The dimensions of the psyche must be experienced, to whatever degree. They cannot be simply defined.
The psyche, always in a state of becoming, obviously has no precise boundaries.
The existence of one implies the existence of all, and so any one given psyche comes into prominence also because of the existence of the others upon which its reality rides.”4
Pure Energy & the Psyche
“Basically, the psyche is a manifestation of pure energy in a particular form.
It is very difficult to consider its experience outside of the framework familiar to you. You demand a certain preciseness of definition and terminology. That vocabulary automatically structures the information.
The psyche is a conglomeration of energy gestalts.
To understand that, you must realize that pure energy has such transforming pattern-forming propensities that it always appears as its manifestations.
It becomes its “camouflages.”
It may form particles, but it would be itself whether or not particles existed.
In the most basic of terms, energy is not divided.
There can be no portions or parts of it, because it is not an entity like a pie, to be cut or divided.
Each smallest unit of pure energy – contains within it the propelling force toward the formation of all possible variations of itself.
The smallest unit of pure energy, therefore, weighing nothing in your terms, containing within itself no mass, would hold within its own nature the propensity for the creation of matter in all of its forms, the impetus to create all possible universes.
In those terms, energy cannot be considered without bringing to the forefront questions concerning the nature of God or All That Is for the terms are synonymous.
Pure energy, or any “portion” of it, contains within itself the creative propensity toward individuation, so that within any given portion all individually conscious life is implied, created, sustained.
Pure energy cannot be destroyed, and is “at every point” simultaneously being created.
Pure energy has no beginning or end.
The psyche, your psyche, is being freshly created “at every point” of its existence.
For that matter, despite all appearance, the physical universe was not born through some explosion of energy which is being dispersed, but is everywhere being created at all of its points “at each moment.
You are unknowingly immersed in and a part of pure energy, being newly created in each moment, so that the energy of your atoms and molecules and of your physical universal system is being replenished at every conceivable moment.
Your psyche is being drawn back into itself, into All That Is, and “out of itself” into your individuation, in psychological pulses of activity that have a correlation with the behavior of electrons in your world.”5
The Individual & the Psyche
“There are also inner “broadcasts” going on constantly – to which, however, you are not consciously attuned.
These keep you in constant touch with the other portions of your own psyche.
You are so a part of the world that your slightest action contributes to its reality.
Your breath changes the atmosphere.
Your encounters with others alter the fabrics of their lives, and the lives of those who come in contact with them.
It may seem that the individual has little power.
On the other hand, each individual alive is a necessary one.
It is true to say that the world begins and ends with each person.
That is, each of your actions is so important, contributing to the experience of others whom you do not know, that each individual is like a center about which the world revolves.
Your acts ripple outward in ways that you do not understand, interacting with the experience of others, and hence forming world events.
Though you are a portion of your psyche, then, your identity is still inviolate.
It will not be submerged or annihilated in a greater self.
It carries a stamp – a divine mark – of its own integrity.
It follows its own focus, and knows itself as itself, even while its own existence as itself may be but a portion of another ‘identity’.”6
God & the Psyche
“Almost any question that you can ask about God can be legitimately asked of the psyche as well.
It seems to you that you know yourself, but that you take the existence of your psyche on faith.
At best, it often seems that you are all that you know of your psyche, and you will complain that you do not know yourself to begin with.
When you say: “I want to find myself,” you usually take it for granted that there is a completed, done, finished version of yourself that you have mislaid somewhere.
When you think of finding God, you often think in the same terms.
When you ask: “What is my psyche, or my soul, or who am I?” you are seeking of course for your own meaning as apart from what you already know about yourself.
In that context, God is as known and as unknown as you are to yourself.
Both God and the psyche are constantly expanding – unutterable, and always becoming.
You will question, most likely, “Becoming what?” For to you it usually seems that all motion tends toward a state of completion of one kind or another.
You think, therefore, in terms of becoming perfect, or becoming free.
The word “becoming” by itself seems to leave you up in the air, so to speak, suspended without definitions.
If I say: “You are becoming what you already are,” then my remark sounds meaningless, for if you already are, how can you become what is already accomplished?
In larger terms, however, what you are is always vaster than your knowledge of yourself, for in physical life you cannot keep up with your own psychological and psychic activity.
So the psyche and its source, or the individual and the God, are so inseparable and interconnected that any attempt to find one apart from the other automatically confuses the issue.
To deny the validity or importance of the individual is, therefore, also to deny the importance or validity of God, for the two exist one within the other, and you cannot separate them.
You are therefore a part of the source, and so is everything else manifest. Because God is, you are. Because you are, God is.
On a conscious level certainly you are not all that God is, for that is the unstated, unmanifest portion of yourself.
Your being rides upon that unstated, unmanifest portion of yourself.
Each person alive is a part of the living God, supported in life by the magnificent power of nature, which is God translated into the elements of the earth and the universe.”7
The Psyche & Associative Processes
“The psyche deals largely with associative processes as it organizes events through association.
Time as such has little meaning in that framework.
Associations are tied together, so to speak, by emotional experience. In a large manner, the emotions defy time.”8
The Psyche & Time
“The psyche is the creator of time complexes.
The psyche, your psyche, can record and experience time backward, forward – or sideways through systems of alternate presents – or it can maintain its own integrity in a no-time environment.
When you travel through the psyche, you will also discover that your own time is automatically squeezed out of shape.
Different portions of the psyche are familiar with different occurrences – because the psyche straddles any of the local laws that you recognize as “official,” and has within itself the capacity to deal with an infinite number of reality-experiences.
The psyche, while being earth-tuned in your experience, also has many other systems of reality “to contend with.”
Each psyche, then, contains within it the potentials, abilities, and powers that are possible, or capable of actualization under any conditions.”9
The Psyche & Probabilities
“The Psyche does not mark time.
To it the intense experiences of your life exist simultaneously.
The psyche deals with probable events, however, so some events – perhaps some that you dreamed of but did not materialize – are quite real to the psyche.
The inner events of the psyche compose the greater experience from which physical events arrive.
They cast an aura that almost magically makes your life your own.
Even if two people encountered precisely the same events in their lives at precisely the same time, their experiences of reality would still hardly be approximately connected.”10
The Psyche as an Event-Former
“The psyche forms events in the same way that the ocean forms waves – except that the ocean’s waves are confined to its surface or to its basin, while the psyche’s events are instantly translated, and splash out into mass psychological reality.
The psyche, as it is turned toward physical reality, is a creator of events, and through them it experiences its own reality as through your own speech you hear your voice.
The larger psyche deals with the greater dimension of events, and the dream state itself is like a laboratory in which your waking reality is constructed.
In a manner of speaking, dream reality is closer to the true nature of events than your experience with physical events leads you to suppose.”11
The Psyche, Symbols, & Specialized Interpreters of Symbols
“Consciousness forms symbols. It is not the other way around.
If you mistake the symbols for the reality, however, you will program your experience, and you will insist that each forest look like the pictures in your book.
In other words, you will expect your own experiences with various portions of your psyche to be more or less the same.
The reality of your own being cannot be defined by anyone but you, and then your own definition must be understood as a reference point at best.
The psychologist, the priest, the physicist, the philosopher or the guru, can explain your own psyche to you only insofar as those specialists can forget that they are specialists, and deal directly with the private psyche from which all specializations come.”12
The Psyche & Direct Knowledge
“When you are in touch with your psyche, you experience direct knowledge.
Direct knowledge is comprehension.
When you are dreaming, you are experiencing direct knowledge about yourself or about the world.
When you are reading a book, you are experiencing indirect knowledge that may or may not lead to comprehension.
Comprehension itself exists whether or not you have the words – or even the thoughts – to express it.
In regular life, you organize your experience very neatly and push it into accepted patterns or channels, into preconceived ideas and beliefs.
You tailor it to fit time sequences.
Again: The psyche’s organization follows no such learned predisposition.
Its products can often appear chaotic simply because they splash over your accepted ideas about what experience is.
Because you tie your experience so directly to time, you rarely allow yourselves any experience, except in dreams, that seem to defy it.
Your ideas about the psyche therefore limit your experience of it.
The psyche, then, possesses within itself an inner affirmation, an affirmation that provides the impetus for physical emergence, an affirmation that keeps man from being completely blinded by his own mental edifices.”13
Exploring Your Consciousness
“You can learn to vastly enrich your own experience.
Theoretically, you can even become aware of other existences to some degree.
You can travel in the dream state into levels of reality separated from your own.
You can learn to use and experience time in new fashions.
You can obtain knowledge from other portions of your own being, and tap the psyche’s resources.
You can improve the world in which you live, and the quality of life.
But while you are physical, you will still experience birth and death, dawn and dusk, and the privacy of the moments, for this is the experience you have chosen.
Even within that context, however, there are surprises and enchantments waiting, if you simply learn to expand your awareness, exploring not only the dream state, but your waking reality in more adventuresome ways.”14
Overcoming Fear of Inner Explorations
“Many individuals are afraid that they will be swept away by inner explorations, that insanity will overtake them, when instead the physical stance of the body and personality is firmly rooted in these alternate organizations.
There is nothing wrong with the conscious mind. You have simply put a lid on it, allowing it to be only so conscious, and no more.
Many of you believe that it is safe to make a nuclear bomb, but that it is insane to use your dreams as another method of manipulating daily life; or that it is all right to be consciously aware of your viruses, wars, and disasters, but that it is not all right to be consciously aware of other portions of the self that could solve such problems.
The idea, then is not to annihilate normal consciousness, but quite literally to expand it by bringing into its focus other levels of reality that it can indeed intrinsically perceive and utilize.
Continue to rely upon known channels of information, but implement these and begin to explore the unrecognized ones also available.”15
The Soul & Oversoul (Higher Self or Entity)
“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” C.S. Lewis
“Each reader, being presently ensconced within a physical form, knows only a small portion of him or herself. The entity is the overall identity of which the personality is one manifestation – an independent and eternally valid portion.”16
The Soul (Entity)
“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.
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.
Mankind says through his religions that he has a soul indeed, without even asking what a soul is, and often he seems to regard it, again, as an object in his possession.”17
The soul is far more creative and complicated than religions have granted it.
It utilizes numberless methods of perception.
It has at its command many other kinds of consciousness.
It can change the focus of its consciousness.
It uses consciousness as you use the eyes in your head.
“Soul, or entity, is also more than consciousness.”18
The soul is not what you have. It is what you are.
It is often considered a finished or static ‘thing’ that belongs to you but is not you.
It is your most intimate powerful inner identity and it is ever-changing.
It is alive, responsive, curious.
It forms the flesh and the world you know.
It is always in a state of becoming, of flux, of learning, of developments that have to do with subjective experience rather than time or space.
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.
The soul is often thought of as a precious stone to be 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.
The soul is first and foremost, creative.
It is the most highly motivated, most highly energized, and most potent consciousness unit known in any universe.
It has unbelievably concentrated energy.
It contains potentials unlimited.
It must work out its own identity and form its own worlds.
It has complete freedom of expression.
It changes form to suit its expression.
It forms environments like stage settings – each setting brings forth new developments.
It is a highly individualized spiritual entity.
It forms whatever body you now wear.
It is the motive force behind your physical survival.
From it you derive your vitality.
“An inner awareness gives the physical being a source of energy and strength. They must, however, come to understand their roles as actors, “finally” from their roles, and through another act of comprehension, return to the entity.
Many imagine the soul to be an immortalized ego, forgetting that the ego as you know it is only a small portion of the self.
The soul above all, perceives and creates.
Remember again that you are a soul now. The soul within you is, therefore, now perceiving.
You can find out what the soul is now. It is not something waiting for you at your death, or is it something you must save or redeem, and it is also something you cannot lose.
It is indestructible.
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 whatever way you want to think of it, continues to exist in your terms.
While your current personality is distinct and individual, it is also but one manifestation of the soul.
The personality you are now and all the personalities that you have been and will be are all manifestations of the soul, your soul.
Your soul 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.
Often it is considered as unchanging, a psychic or spiritual citadel – but citadels not only keep out invaders, they also prevent expansion and development.
The soul is an open spiritual system, a powerhouse of creativity that shoots out in all directions.
The soul perceives all experience directly.
The soul does not need to follow the laws and principles that are a part of the physical reality, and it does not depend upon physical perception.
Its perception is of mental acts and events beneath physical perception.
Perceptions are not dependent on time, because time is a physical camouflage and does not apply to nonphysical reality.
The soul does not require a physical body for perception.
Perception is not dependent on physical senses – this continues whether or not you are in this life or another.
Physical existence is one way in which the soul chooses to experience its own actuality – it has created a world for you to inhabit and change – a complete sphere of activity in which new developments and new forms of consciousness can emerge.
In a manner of speaking, you continually create your soul as it continually creates you.
The soul can be considered as an electromagnetic energy field, of which you are a part. It is a field of concentrated action when you consider it in this light – a powerhouse of probabilities or probable action, seeking to be expressed; a grouping of nonphysical consciousnesses that nevertheless knows itself as an identity.
In terms of psychology – the soul can be considered a prime identity that is a gestalt of many other individual consciousnesses – an unlimited self that is able to express itself in many ways and forms and still maintains its own identity, its own “I am-ness”.
This “I am-ness” is retained even though it may move and travel with other such energy fields.
There is a give and take between souls or entities and no end of possibilities of development and expansion.
The soul is not a closed system.
It is not frightened for its identity – It is sure of itself. It ever seeks.
It is not afraid of being overwhelmed by experience or perception.
The soul is a traveler; but it is also the creator of all experience, and of all destinations in your terms.
It creates worlds as it goes, so to speak.
The soul is not built upon concepts of good and evil; however it knows in certain systems (such as our present one) problems of good and evil exist and good is preferable to evil.
Overall, the soul knows that good and evil are but different manifestations of a far greater reality.”19
Cells and Souls and the Oversoul
“A group of cells forms an organ.
A group of selves forms an oversoul.
You are a part of your oversoul. It belongs to you, and you to it.
You dwell within its reality as a cell dwells within the reality of an organ.
The organ is temporal in your terms. The oversoul is not.
The cell is material in your terms. The self is not.
The oversoul, or greater self, is composed of souls.
Each self has its own soul within the oversoul, and the oversoul is itself a part of the entity’s multidimensional structure.
All the cells that now make up your physical form obviously exist at once. Imagine you have many lives enduring in the same fashion. Instead of cells, you have selves.
Think of the greater you, the entity, as forming a psychic structure as real as your physical one but composed of many selves.
Your entity is aware of much larger dimensions of activity than you are, yet its more sophisticated consciousness rests upon your own, and one is necessary to the other.
In terms of consciousness, the entity or greater you knows as much more than you know, as you know more than your cells.
As the smallest cell within your body participates to its degree in your daily experience, so does the oversoul to an immeasurably greater extent share in the events of the entity.
The cell does not need to be consciously aware of you in order to fulfill itself, even though your expectations of health largely influence its existence, but your recognition of the oversoul and entity can help you direct energies from these other dimensions into your daily life.
You, dear reader, are in the process of expanding your psychic structure, of becoming a conscious participator with the oversoul, in certain terms, of becoming what your oversoul is. As cells multiply and grow – within their own nature and the physical framework – so do selves “evolve” in terms of value fulfillment.
When you are aware of the existence of the entity and of the oversoul, you can consciously draw upon their greater energy, understanding and strength.”20
A Death is but One Night to the Soul.
“The vaster entity of which you are part follows your progress as easily as you follow your own through the days.
In those terms, the entity wakes up as a different person each day, in a different century, each life seeming like a day in its level of experience. It carries the memory and simultaneous experience of each of those selves.
Within that vast form is your own, which is briefer, yet is not lost, not limited and not predetermined.
You form your corner of the universe, which is itself a part of another one.
Within this the actions and beliefs of one affect all.”21
“I want to emphasize, that while all this sounds difficult in the telling, it becomes much clearer intuitively when you learn to experience what you are, for if you cannot travel inside your physical body to find your identity, you can travel through your psychological self.
There are far more wonders to perceive through this inward exploration than you can possibly believe until you begin such a journey for yourself.
You are a soul; you are a particular manifestation of a soul, and it is sheer nonsense to think that you must remain ignorant of the nature of your own being. You may not be able to put your knowledge clearly into words, but this will in no way negate the value or the validity of the experience that that will be yours once you begin to look inward.”22
The Oversoul as the Higher Self according to The Law of One23
You are existing at all levels simultaneously.
Your higher self (Oversoul) is you in mid-sixth density.
Your higher self (Oversoul), as you measure time, is yourself in your future.
The Higher Self (Oversoul) is that self which exists with full understanding of the accumulation of experiences of the entity, aids the entity in achieving healing of the experiences which have not been learned properly and assists in further life experience programming.
The Higher Self (Oversoul) does not manipulate its past selves.
It protects when possible and guides when asked, but the force of free will is paramount.
The seeming contradictions of determinism and free will melt when it is accepted that there is such a thing as true simultaneity of time.
The Higher Self (Oversoul) is a being of unity and a personality enormously rich in variety of experience and subtlety of emotion.
The Higher Self (Oversoul) has available to it the totality of experiences which have been collected by a “mind/body/spirit complex totality” and a very firm grasp of the lessons to be learned in this density.
This information is available to the Higher Self (Oversoul) to be used as projected probability/possibility vortices in order to better aid in future life programming.
A “mind/body/spirit complex totality” is in some part a collection of parallel developments of the same entity (Soul).
This totality is like the parallel lives lived by one personality or soul that makes up the Oversoul. It is constantly changing and is ‘as the shifting sands’.
This totality is a nebulous collection of all that may occur held in understanding.
This totality functions as a resource to the Higher Self.
The Higher Self (Oversoul) is aware of the lessons learned through the sixth density. The progress rate is fairly well understood. The choices which must be made to achieve the Higher Self exist in the origin of the mind/body/spirit complex (Soul) itself.
The higher self is like the map in which the destination is known; the roads are very well known, these roads being designed by intelligent infinity working through intelligent energy. However, the higher self aspect can program only for the lessons and certain predisposing limitations if it wishes. The remainder is completely the free choice of each entity (Soul). There is the perfect balance between the known and the unknown.
The Higher Self has the honor/duty of using both the experiences of its total living bank of memory of experienced thoughts and actions, and using the resource of the mind/body/spirit complex totality left behind as a type of infinitely complex thought-form.
In this way you may see your Self (Soul), your Higher self or Oversoul, and your mind/body/spirit complex totality as three points in a circle. The only distinction is that of your time/space continuum. All are the same being.
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, http://www.lawofone.info/
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