CHAPTER 5

(Five weeks ago [in the notes leading off Session 821], I wrote that Jane could resume work on The Further Education of Oversoul Seven — or Seven Two — at any time. She finished her first novel about Seven in July 1972, and within a month, long before it was published, she wrote the first five chapters for Seven Two. Then we became involved in so many other projects that she laid it aside until August 1976, when she wrote two more chapters. The book has hovered in the back of her consciousness ever since, waiting until she focused her attention upon it once again. “Seven’s got all the time in the world,” she laughed more than once. But now that her editor, Tam Mossman, has scheduled a visit to us at the hill house in a couple of weeks [on April 10, to be exact], Jane feels that she wants to study what she’s done on Seven Two, go over it with Tam, and perhaps take up work on it again.)

To begin with, dictation. New chapter (5): “The Mechanics of Experience.”

In titling this chapter I used the word “mechanics,” because mechanisms suggest smooth technological workings. While the world is not a machine — its inner workings are such that no technology could ever copy them — this involves a natural mechanics in which the inner dimensions of consciousness everywhere emerge to form a materialized, cohesive, physical existence. Again, your interpretations of identity teach you to focus awareness in such a way that you cannot follow the strands of consciousness that connect you with all portions of nature. In a way, the world is like a multidimensional, exotic plant growing in space and time, each thought, dream, imaginative encounter, hope or fear, growing naturally into its own bloom — a plant of incredible variety, never for a moment the same, in which each smallest root, leaf, stem, or flower has a part to play and is connected with the whole.