“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This morning I showed Jane the portrait in oils that I’m working on. It’s of one of my imaginary male heads, and I began it a week ago, following Seth’s material on art for me in the private session for April 9. [See Note 1 for the last session.] I explained to Jane that even while it’s incomplete, the painting contains improvements that I can already tell will be developed further in the next one. Once I start a work in a certain mode, it becomes somewhat set in that expression; this is inevitable if one is to ever complete the physical painting. Those sensed, additional improvements have to wait for the next effort: A creative tension between the present and the future is set up, then—one that I’ve often felt, an impatience to leap ahead to the next step even while I’m still working out the current one. I asked that Seth comment upon the painting tonight if he cared to.

Direct cognition is an inner sense. In physical terms you might call it remote sensing. Your physical body, and your physical existence, are based upon certain kinds of direct cognition, and it is responsible for the very functioning of the reasoning mind itself. Scientists like to say that animals operate through simple instinctive behavior, without will or volition: It is no accomplishment for a spider to make its web, a beaver its dam, a bird its nest, because according to such reasoning, such creatures cannot perform otherwise. The spider must spin his web. If he chooses not to, he will not survive. But by that same reasoning—to which, of course, I do not subscribe—you should also add that man can take no credit either for his intellect, since man must think, and cannot help doing so.

(9:33.) Man’s reasoning mind, however, with its fascinating capacity for logic and deduction, and for observation, rests upon (pause) a direct cognition—a direct cognition that powers his thoughts, that makes thinking itself possible. He thinks because he knows how to think by thinking (intently), even though the true processes of thought are enigmas to the reasoning mind.¹

Regardless of who or what he is, then, with Jane’s permission Seth adds his material to the information possessed by her reasoning mind—and thus offers it to the reasoning minds of others.