“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

That perception was not the sort of official sense data recognized by your sciences. Ruburt did not come to his recognition of the world’s mental source through reasoning. Neither could any ordinary physical perception have given him that information. His consciousness left his body — an event not even considered possible by many educated people. Ruburt’s consciousness merged, while still retaining its own individuality, with the consciousness of the leaves outside his window, and with the nail in the windowsill, and traveled outward and inward at the same time, so that like a mental wind his consciousness traveled through other psychological neighborhoods.

Your intents have a great effect upon your body’s health. In the same fashion, jointly all of the people alive at any given time “direct” the events of the universe to behave in a certain fashion, even though the processes must happen by themselves, or automatically. Other species have a hand in this also, however, and in one way or another all of you direct the activity of the physical body of the world in much the same way that you [each] direct your own bodily behavior.

Reasoning by itself can only deal with deductions made about the known world. It cannot accept knowledge that comes from “elsewhere,” for such information will not fit in reason’s categories, and confounds its cause-and-effect patterning. The power to reason comes from Framework 2. In the terms of this discussion, you are able to reason as a result of “magical” events that make reason itself possible. The term “magic” has in one way or another been used to simply describe events for which reason has no answer — events that exist outside of the framework in which reason feels comfortable.

The mother could not consciously control the bodily processes that lead to birth. In the truest sense, the birth magically happens, as miraculous in those terms as the so-called initial emergence of life upon the planet itself. Scientific analysis of the brain will tell you nothing about the power that moves your thoughts, or hint at the source of the brain’s abilities. However, the constant activity between Frameworks 1 and 2 is constantly apparent in the very existence of your world, and in the relationships involving your imagination, feelings, and beliefs, and those private and shared events that compose your experience.

Nor do I mean to agree with those who ask you to use your intuitions and feelings at the expense of your reason. Instead I will suggest other paths later in this book. Your reasoning as you now use it, however, deals primarily with reality by dividing it into categories, forming distinctions, following the “laws” of cause and effect — and largely its realm is the examination of events already perceived. In other words, it deals with the concrete nature of ascertained events that are already facts in your world.

On the other hand your intuitions follow a different kind of organization, as does your imagination — one involved with associations, an organization that unifies diverse elements and brings even known events together in a kind of unity that is often innocent of the limitations dictated by cause and effect. In those terms, then, Framework 2 deals with associations, so that within it the recognizable events of the physical world can be put together in an infinite number of ways, after which they appear in your private experience according to directions you have given them through those associations that you form mentally.

1. Jane’s book (which is now being typeset) is The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James. See, for example, Note 2 for Session 801, and the opening notes for sessions 804 and 821.