“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

According to Seth, our own desires, focuses, and intents dictate what inner information we draw from the endless fields available; for he sees all knowledge existing at once, not as dry data or records, but enlivened by the consciousness that perceives it. The minds of the past and future are open to us, or at least their contents are, not in a parasitic relationship but in a lively give-and-take, in which knowledge from each time period enriches every other historical era. Seth gives this pooling of knowledge both a spiritual and biological reality.

The implications of such statements for education are astonishing: Besides teaching rote information, our schools and universities should acquaint us with as many fields as possible; for these act as exterior triggers, bringing forth natural inner knowledge, sparking skills which are waiting for activation by suitable stimuli in the exterior world.

While Seth dictated this book, devoted to the potentials of the psyche and its reception of inner information, my own experiences — as usual — seemed to serve as object lessons backing up his thesis. Seth had barely begun Psyche, for instance, when I suddenly became the psychic recipient of a book on art philosophy and techniques. It purported to come from the “world view” of Paul Cézanne, the famous French artist who died at the start of this century.

Seth maintains that inner information often comes into our minds, though it is sifted through our individual psyches and tinted by our own lives so that frequently we never recognize its source. Sometimes this happens in dreams or as inspiration: Inventors, for example, might be receiving a given idea from the future, or an archaeologist might make a discovery as the result of receiving information from the past.

Seth maintains that our inner knowledge usually merges so smoothly with our present concerns that we seldom recognize its source, yet it provides the individual and the species with a reliable, constant stream of information through a psychological lifeline to which we are each connected.

He discusses in depth the experience of early man and the different organizations of perception that prevailed, and stresses that the species has always had access to “inner data” so that its source of knowledge was never exclusively dependent upon exterior circumstances. According to Seth, it is from this interior body of knowledge that our systemized, objective, information-storing social processes emerge.

And in all of this, as always, Seth stresses probabilities as playing a vital role in the development of the individual and the species, and as representing the basis for free will. He sees the psyche experimenting privately with probable actions in the dream state, and envisions humanity’s mass dreams as providing an inner vehicle by which man chooses global events. The psyche is private, yet all in all, each psyche contains access to the public psyche.

At this writing, Seth is nearly halfway through The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which will show where and how private beliefs become public events. I’ve finished for publication Emir’s Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers (the entire first chapter came in a dream), and The Further Education of Oversoul Seven. All of this, Seth’s books and my own, surely gives evidence of the psyche’s vast creativity, and of its abilities to perceive and use information that comes from the inner, as well as from the exterior environment.