“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Physically you have at your fingertips certain accumulations of knowledge, objectified through the passage of information verbally through the ages, in records or books, and through television. [Now] you use computers to help you process information, and you have a more or less direct access to physical knowledge. You acquired it through the use of your senses. There is systematized knowledge, where men have accumulated facts in one particular field, processing it in one way or another. Your own senses bring you information each moment, and that information is in a way already invisibly processed according to your own beliefs, desires, and intents.

1. Jane rather surprised me: I knew she had an interested if generalized awareness of the old theory of the ether (or the luminiferous ether), but I hadn’t realized she was well-enough acquainted with the idea to be able to verbalize it that succinctly for Seth. In several texts I have, the authors wrote about the ether, and Jane may have read those passages. I may have discussed the theory with her, but I don’t remember doing so.

The idea of the ether, or something like it, had been around since the time of the ancient Greeks. By the last decades of the 19th century, and in line with Newtonian physics, the ether was postulated as an invisible, tasteless, odorless substance that pervaded all unoccupied space, and served as the medium for the passage of electromagnetic waves of light and other kinds of radiant energy, like heat — just as the earth itself serves as the medium for the transmission of seismic waves, for instance.