This applies to all of us. Because we are usually so worried about preserving what we think of as our identity, we use terms like reincarnational selves or counterparts. If we would clearly see that there is no contradiction if I say that we are uniquely oneself, that our individuality has an indestructible validity that is never assailed, and when I also say that we are at the same time connected with other identities, each as sacredly inviolate as our own.

We are used to thinking of exterior organizational patterns. We might live in a city and a state and a country at one time, yet we do not think that our presence in one of these categories contradicts either of the other two. So we live amid psychic organizations, each having its own characteristics. We may consider oneself Indian though we live in America, or American though we live in Africa, or Chinese though we live in France, and we are quite able to retain our sense of individuality.

So the psychic families, or families of consciousness, can be thought of as natives of inner countries of the mind, sharing heritages, purposes, and intents that may have little to do with the physical countries in which we live our surface lives. People are born in any month of the year in every country. All those in Norway are not born in January or August. In the same way, all the members of any given psychic family are spread across the earth, following inner patterns that may or may not relate to other issues as they are currently understood.

Certain families have a liking for certain months of birth, but no specific rules apply. There is indeed an inner kind of order that unites all of these issues; yet that inner order is not the result of laws, but of spontaneous creation, which flows into its own kinds of patterns. We see patterns at any given time and try to make laws of them.

I am trying to stretch our imaginations, and help us throw aside rigid concepts that literally blind us to the dimensions of our own reality. We are biologically equipped to perceive far more of that reality than we do.

We are not a miniature self, an adjunct to some superbeing, never to share fully in its reality. In those terms we are that superself–looking out of only one eye, or using one finger.

Much of this is very difficult to verbalize. We are not subordinate to some giant consciousness. While we think in such terms, however. I must speak of reincarnational selves and counterparts, because we are afraid that if we climb out of what we think our identity is, then we will lose it.