“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Because you tie your experience so directly to time, you rarely allow yourselves any experiences, except in dreams, that seem to defy it. Your ideas about the psyche therefore limit your experience of it. Ruburt is far more lenient than most of my readers in that regard. Still, he often expects his own rather unorthodox experiences to appear in the kind of orderly garb with which you are all familiar.

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.”

Ruburt’s love for Joseph, his own purposes, and his growing questions, along with his interest in painting in general, triggered exactly the kind of stimulus that broke through conventional beliefs about time and knowledge. Ruburt tuned in to Cézanne’s “world view.” He did not contact Cézanne per se, but Cézanne’s comprehension of painting as an art.

Ruburt is not technically facile enough even to follow Cézanne’s directions. Joseph is facile enough, but he would not want to follow the vision of another. The information, however, is extremely valuable, and knowledge on any kind of subject is available in just such a manner — but it is attained through desire and through intent.

It seems almost heresy to suppose that such knowledge is available, for then what use is education? Yet education should serve to introduce a student to as many fields of endeavor as possible, so that he or she might recognize those that serve as natural triggers, opening skills or furthering development. The student will, then, pick and choose. The Cézanne material was from the past, yet future knowledge is quite as accessible. There are, of course, probable futures from the standpoint of your past. Future information is theoretically available there, just as the body’s “future” pattern of development was at your birth — and that certainly was practical.

(At 10:55 I did ask Seth a question, which he discussed until 11:24 P.M.)