“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: The lamplight episode. Here you did as you supposed. You viewed that inner light, but the lampshades had two purposes: one, as you surmised, to give you a comforting image, literally to shade your eyes. Ruburt was correct, however, in seeing the connection between the lampshades and the Nazi experiments (in World War II) with human skin. The movie (on television last night), about cloning and Nazi atrocities, had made you wonder about the nature of life once again, and man’s immortality. The connection with cloning came out in the lampshades made of (human) skins, in the old news stories—though your lampshades merely stood for those, and were of fabric. The connection was beneath, however, and also represented your feeling that even those people tortured to death did live again. They were not extinguished. Their consciousnesses were indeed like bulbs, say, turned on in new lamps. The lights connected life and death, then. The lights also represented pure knowing.

(Long pause.) The paintings that you have envisioned, for example, exist there, and they are every bit as real as the paintings in your studio. I am not speaking symbolically here. There is indeed light that you do not see, sound that you do not hear, sensation that you do not feel. All of these belong to the realm of the inner senses. The inner senses represent your true powers of perception. They represent, say, your native nonphysical perceptive “equipment.” The physical senses are relatively easy to distinguish: You know what you see from what you hear. If you close your eyes, you do not see.

2. We moved from our downtown apartments into the hill house almost five years ago (in March 1975), but Jane thinks she tried to write the poem Seth referred to several years before that. (She began speaking for Seth late in 1963.) I have no memory of her struggling with such a poem. I was most curious to see it so that I could quote a bit of it here. Jane has stacks of journals, poetry notebooks, manuscripts, and loose notes of all kinds, but neither of us could dig out what we wanted. Very frustrating! We hadn’t been as careful then about dating our work as we are now. “But I know I didn’t throw out whatever I did on that poem,” Jane said. One of us will probably find it someday—while looking for something else.

4. It took me a while to realize that Seth had made a most interesting statement here—implying that somehow I’d picked up Floyd’s worries about his age and virility. Floyd, Jane, and I are good friends, and he’s well acquainted with our work. He’s a few years younger than I am (I’m 60), but as far as I can remember the two of us haven’t discussed such matters, even jokingly. Consciously. I enjoy and appreciate my age and virility each day without being concerned about them, yet my dream certainly revealed that on other levels I’m at least speculating about such issues. It’s easy to say those cares represent negative beliefs, but I think much more than that is involved—universal questions, actually, that all men and women have chosen to contend with in physical life.