“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The information may not fit into your recognizable time or space slots. There are, in fact, many important issues connected with the dreaming state that can involve genetic activation of certain kinds: information processing on the part of the species, the insertion or reinsertion of civilizing elements—and all of these are also connected with the reincarnational aspects of dreaming.

I have not touched upon some of these subjects before, since I wanted to present them in that larger context of man’s origins and historic appearance as a species. I also wanted to make certain points, stressing the importance of dreams as they impinge upon and help form cultural environments. Dreams also sometimes help in showing the pathways that can be taken to advantage by an individual, or by a group of individuals, and therefore help clarify the ways in which free will might most advantageously be directed. So I hope to cover all of these subjects.

(Long pause.) Let us first of all return momentarily to the subject of the reasoning mind, its uses and characteristics. It seems to the reasoning mind that it must look outside of itself for information, for it operates in concert with the physical senses, which present it with only a limited amount of information about the environment at any given time. The physical eyes cannot see today the dawn that will come in the morning. The legs today cannot walk down tomorrow’s street, so if the mind wants to know what is going to happen tomorrow, or what is happening now, outside of the physical senses’ domain, then it must try through reason to deduce the information that it wants from the available information that it has. It must rely upon observation to make its deductions accordingly. In a fashion, it must divide to conquer. It must try to deduce the nature of the whole it cannot perceive from the portions that are physically available.

Indeed, when a child is involved, the keener his use of the reasoning mind becomes the dimmer his mathematical abilities grow. Others, children [or adults] who would be classified as mentally deficient, can tell, or have been able to tell, the day of the week that any given date, past or present, would fall upon. Others have been able, while performing various tasks, to keep a precise count of the moments from any given point in time. There have been children, again, with highly accomplished musical abilities, and great facility with music’s technical aspects—all such accomplishments before the assistance of any kind of advanced education.

Some of those abilities show themselves in those classified as mentally deficient simply because all of the powers of the reasoning mind are not activated. In children under such conditions, the reasoning mind has not yet developed in all of its aspects sufficiently, so that in a certain area direct cognition shines through with its brilliant capacity.

1. With a little reflection it becomes obvious, but I think it important to note that Jane’s expression of the Seth material is certainly the result of her direct cognition. Because she has to deliver it linearly in words, which take “time,” she cannot produce her material almost at once, as the mathematical prodigy can his or her answers, but in their own way her communications with Seth are as psychologically clear and direct as the calculator’s objective products are with numbers, or the musician’s are with notes. From the very beginning of the sessions, in late 1963, I appreciated the speed with which Jane delivered the Seth material, and began recording the times involved throughout each session. I now think that spontaneously starting to do that reflected my own intuitive understanding of her direct cognition, long before either one of us knew how to describe it. And when Jane speaks extemporaneously for Seth, her delivery is even more rapid. It was most definitely faster—sometimes spectacularly so—during all of those years she gave sessions in ESP class.