“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is not [so much] that such developments are beyond man’s capacity as it is that they involve manipulations impossible to make for all practical purposes, from his present standpoint. He could theoretically move to a better vantage point in the twinkling of an eye, relatively speaking, but for now we must largely use analogies. Those analogies may lead you or Ruburt, or a few others, to a more advantageous vantage point, so that certain leaps become possible—but those leaps, you see, are not just leaps of intellect but of will and intuition alike, fused and focused.

Ruburt glimpsed some of the principles involved when you were at [your downtown apartments] on several occasions—once when he tried to write a poem about the comprehensions that simply would not be verbalized.² I do not know how to explain some of this, but in your terms there is (underlined) light within (underlined) darkness. Light has more manifestations than its physical version (intently), so that even when it may not be physically manifested there is light everywhere, and that light is the source of your physical version and its physical laws. In a manner of speaking, light itself forms darkness. Each unit of consciousness, whatever its degree, is, again, composed of energy—and that energy manifests itself with a kind of light that is not physically perceived: a light that is basically, now, far more intense than any physical variety, and a light from which all colors emerge.

The physical senses have to screen out such perceptions. That light, however, is literally everywhere at once, and it is a “knowing light,” as Ruburt’s [William] James perceived.³

Now: On certain occasions, sometimes near the point of death, but often simply in conscious states outside of the body, man is able to perceive that kind of light. In some out-of-body experiences Ruburt, for example, saw colors more dazzling than any physical ones, and you saw the same kind of colors in your dream. They are a part of your inner senses’ larger spectrum of perception, and in the dream state you were not relying upon your physical senses at all.

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.