“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Sessions 760-61 were devoted to separate topics that Seth has been developing apart from his regular book dictation for Psyche.

(“I feel half massive, but half relaxed, too,” Jane said as we waited for the session to begin. “I feel an odd sense of frustration — or maybe just impatience is a better way to put it…. I think all of this psychic stuff that I’m half aware of has to be organized and expressed in our world — Seth, Cézanne, this book — so that we can make sense of the whole thing.”

When you are in touch with your psyche, you experience direct knowledge. Direct knowledge is comprehension. When you are dreaming, you are experiencing direct knowledge about yourself or about the world. You are comprehending your own being in a different way. When you are reading a book, you are experiencing indirect knowledge that may or may not lead to comprehension. Comprehension itself exists whether or not you have the words — or even the thoughts — to express it. You may comprehend the meaning of a dream without understanding it at all in verbal terms. Your ordinary thoughts may falter, or slip and slide around your inner comprehension without ever really coming close to expressing it.

(9:25.) In Seth Speaks I tried to describe certain extensions of your own reality in terms that my readers could understand. In The Nature of Personal Reality I tried to extend the practical boundaries of individual existence as it is usually experienced. I tried to give the reader hints that would increase practical, spiritual, and physical enjoyment and fulfillment in daily life. Those books were dictated by me in a more or less straight narrative style. In “Unknown” Reality I went further, showing how the experiences of the psyche splash outward into the daylight, so to speak. Hopefully in that book, through my dictation and through Ruburt’s and Joseph’s experiences, the reader could see the greater dimensions that touch ordinary living, and sense the psyche’s magic. That book required much more work on Joseph’s part, and that additional effort itself was a demonstration that the psyche’s events are very difficult to pin down in time.

In our last book session, I gave the title for this chapter, mentioning the emotions and association; and the fact that the psyche must be directly experienced. I have not dictated a book session per se again until this evening. In the meantime, Ruburt has been experiencing dimensions of the psyche new to him.

It did not occur to him that those experiences had anything to do with this book, or that in acting so spontaneously he was following any kind of inner order. He wanted these pages to follow neatly one by one. Each of his experiences, however, demonstrates the ways in which the psyche’s direct experiences defy your prosaic concepts of time, reality, and the orderly sequence of events. They also served to point up the differences between knowledge and comprehension, and emphasize the importance of desire and of the emotions.

Ruburt paints as a hobby. Sometimes he paints for fairly long periods of time, then forgets about it. Joseph is an artist. Ruburt has been wondering about the contents of the mind, curious as to what information was available to it. The Christmas holidays were approaching. He asked Joseph what he would like for a gift, and Joseph more or less replied: “A book on Cézanne.”