“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we waited for the session Jane began to enter a transcendent, or enhanced, state of consciousness. I started noting down her experiences, but missed out on some of her descriptions because of the speed with which she talked. Her hands acquired a velvety, luxurious “inner smoothness.” Then she had the feeling of those familiar “giant faces” peering down into our universe — and rather nostalgically, too, she laughed. [See the extensive notes for the 653rd session in Chapter Thirteen, describing her various states of altered perception last April 2. In one of those intervals she’d sensed giants standing about the rim of our world.] Now, Jane said, from their massive viewpoint these observers could see “everything happening at once in our world, from California to Russia — like astronauts looking back at us….”

Ruburt’s perception is highly altered this evening, and this is an example of certain kinds of both affirmation and denial. He has always emphasized his own unique creative and intuitive processes. In so doing, he denied many of the concepts believed in by others. He accepted the belief that any consciousness could be in some kind of direct intimate contact with experiences and realities usually not perceived, but ignored.

The mind can interpret the experiences that the legs and the feet have, however, and by imaginatively using that sensual data can perceive the ant’s reality to some extent. Now when the mind races and runs, it sometimes has great difficulty interpreting its activities to the brain, which is usually concerned with other realities only to the extent that they impinge upon it.

Now: Ruburt’s mind is far more aware of other realities than his brain is, but he consciously believes in the greater reality of himself and his perceptions. The brain also possesses this belief, and so it opens itself as much as possible to the mind’s activities. Because it does, certain intuitive psychic and “intellectually spacious” experiences can be physically felt to some extent. The knowledge is interpreted through alterations in body sensation, which give it an important corporeal validity. In such cases high mental and psychic activity is reflected in the body’s experience, providing a beneficial unity.

Here I have used the term “spacious” for workings of the mind and intuitions that exist in what you might call an accelerated range of action. The normal intellect, oriented so precisely by beliefs to the inevitability of a one-focused kind of perception, is limited.

(10:45.) A certain kind of affirmation of self allows the brain to tune into these more spacious methods of perception that are the natural characteristics of the mind. There are very good reasons why this type of assertion must first occur. The brain (and the entire physical system) is meant to insure your bodily survival and to follow your conscious beliefs about reality. There is always a harmonious unifying connection between your beliefs and activities. Some people feel utterly confident in certain areas and are timorous in others. Some aspects of life may be ignored or even refuted for a time while others are focused upon. The individual will very cleverly and shrewdly go ahead in those areas in which he or she feels safe, often when in the process of altering beliefs. You will not use your spacious mind until you affirm its reality within yourself, and until you are ready to handle the additional data which will then become consciously available to one extent or another. But the spacious mind operates through your creaturehood; in your terms it represents latent abilities of consciousness that can be more or less normal functions.

(11:00.) You do not have to know anything about so-called psychic matters necessarily. Many individuals use the spacious mind and its perceptions, taking it for granted without realizing how different their own perception is from that of others.

In the same way you also carry within you structures not yet fully used; those organizations point — in your terms now — toward future evolution. Use of the spacious mind involves these. Individuals through all the ages have experienced this other kind of awareness, though never to its fullest form.

(Long pause at 11:05, eyes closed.) Experience with the spacious mind dissolves any seeming conflicts that occur between the intellect and the intuitions at other levels. To whatever extent possible, the physical organism interprets that unity through a new mixture of sense data, so that materially the information makes sense.

An individual can tune into spacious-mind operation two or three times in a lifetime without realizing it, and have experiences that he finds difficult to interpret later. The affirmation involved is one of transcendence, in which for a time a person affirms his reality in flesh and at the same time states his independence from it (smile) — and realizes that both of these conditions exist simultaneously. A dual perception takes place in which the spacious mind is activated. By “activated” I mean that the physical organism is suddenly aware of [the spacious mind’s] existence.

(11:14. Jane’s delivery had moved right along for the most part. “But I had a hell of a time getting into the session,” she said, “because I was having such a ball with those sounds. I’m glad I did, though….” Her state of altered consciousness lingered. “Right now, even, my voice sounds just great to me, and my hands feel real liquidy, almost like water….”

(The wind had quieted. We didn’t hear firecrackers any longer, just the smoothly rushing traffic sounds. I made Jane a peanut butter sandwich, using whole wheat bread. When she picked it up she said, staring, “It’s almost as if you’ve got to choose between biting into the sandwich, your hand that holds it, or your knee beneath the hand — not because you’re disoriented but because everything’s all one. When you grow aware of that, then you’re confronted with making conscious choices.”

Now: When utilized properly and fully in your terms of time, the spacious mind will vastly enrich the dimensions of the species, bringing the body into a greater harmony than now possible.

On a neurological basis there are unreleased, latent triggers that can be set off, and when they are, your practical experience with time as you know it will be altered. From your viewpoint the species will then be so different that it will seem to be another one entirely. As Ruburt once suggested, your [modern] system of communications has already expanded the data available to a private conscious mind in a given amount of time, and this on a purely physical level.

Jet travel scrambles your idea and experience of time, and in so doing alters your concepts of it. But within the mechanisms of the body there are unused and unrecognized triggers that will allow you, as a species, to consciously handle greater perceptions of time just as you now handle greater perceptions of space.

(12:02.) In a very limited and fumbling manner this is hinted at through the use of computers, where you try to assess “future probabilities” and act accordingly in your present. The mind can do this far better than any computer. If it believed this, then certain portions of the brain would be activated. The brain would become aware of more of the mind’s knowledge, and the probabilities of future events would be made consciously available.

Now the brain would have to sort out this information so that the physically attuned mechanism was clearly able to maintain its temporal present. When man first developed the pause of reflection, as mentioned earlier in this book (see sessions 635–36 in Chapter Nine), he did undergo initial disorientation before he learned to distinguish a vividly remembered event of the past from a presently experienced one. The growing consciousness had to make such distinctions for practical behavior. To utilize future probable events, the physical brain would be forced to enlarge its function while keeping the individual in clear relationship with the present moment of power, or corporeal effectiveness. Affirmation always involves the acknowledgement of your power in the present. In greater terms, denial is the surrendering of that power. Affirmation then is the acquiescence to your ability, as a spirit within flesh, to form the physical reality of your creaturehood.

Suppose you have a particular goal in mind as a youngster, toward which you work. Your intent, images, desires and determination form a psychic force that is projected out ahead of you, so to speak. You send the reality of yourself from your present into what you think of as the future.