“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The light of your questions (pause) is, in its way (underlined), an apport from that other inner universe. In your world light has certain properties and limits. It is physically perceived by the eyes, and to a far lesser degree by the skin itself. In your world light comes from the sun. It has been an exterior source, and in your world light and dark certainly appear to be opposites.

In that dream your worries were initially reflected—worries that your friend Floyd has also encountered on his own about virility and age,⁴ so you saw the two of you in a five-and-ten-cent store, simply representing the world of commerce, where items are sold: Did you still have a value in that world? Were you still virile? You were each to take your test. (Pause.) Others saw you but were unconcerned, showing that the concern was your own, but also expressing the feeling that the world might not really care.

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.

The inner senses, though I have in the past described them by separating their functions and characteristics, basically operate together in such a way that in your terms it would be highly difficult to separate one from the others. They function with a perfect spontaneous order, aware of all synchronicities. In that psychological universe, then, it is possible for entities “to be everywhere at once,” aware of everything at once. Your world is composed of such “entities”—the units of consciousness that form your body. The kinds of conscious minds that you have cannot hold that kind of information.

“Jane and I went to bed at about 1:15 A.M., after watching a movie on television. Subject: World War II. Jane lay quietly on my right, her back to me. As I rested face up in a very pleasant and peaceful state, waiting to enter the sleep state, I became aware of two extremely bright lights shining off to my right, beyond Jane’s form but within my peripheral vision. I knew, or saw, that these lights came from ordinary table lamps with columnar shades of white fabric, and that they sat on a round oak table like the one in our living room. The shade of the closest lamp was fatter and taller than its companion’s, but this didn’t seem to matter: I soon realized that both lights were supernally bright—so strong, indeed, that although I was very tempted to turn my head to look straight at them, I refrained because I wasn’t sure I could stand facing them. I understood that the lampshades were both comforting and protective, however, and I felt no fear, or even unease, at this adventure. I knew that I wasn’t dreaming, that the experience was most unusual. I also knew that by an act of will I could ‘swing’ the lights around in front of me if I wanted to, and I tried enough of this to verify that it was possible: As they moved the lights began to grow even more powerful—enough to quickly convince me that I didn’t want to confront their glare full blast, even with the shades.

3. See the passages following Jane’s entry for March 31, 1977, in Chapter 10 of her The After Death Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James.