“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.

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.

Dreams deal with associations and with emotional validities that often do not seem to make sense in the usual world. I said before that no one can really give you a definition of the psyche. It must be experienced. Since its activities, wisdom and perception rise largely from another kind of reference, then you must often learn to interpret your encounter with the psyche to your usual self. One of the largest difficulties here is the issue of organization. In regular life, you organize your experience very neatly and push it into accepted patterns or channels, into preconceived ideas and beliefs. You tailor it to fit time sequences. Again: The psyche’s organization follows no such learned predisposition. Its products can often appear chaotic simply because they splash over your accepted ideas about what experience is.

(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.

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.

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.

The private psyche, the part of you that you do not recognize, is aware of those patterns even as it is aware of private physical biological patterns about which it forms your image. Certain leanings, inclinations, and probabilities are present then in your biological structure, to be triggered or not according to your purposes and intents. You may personally have the ability to be a fine athlete, for example. Yet your inclinations and intents may carry you in a different direction, so that the necessary triggers are not activated. Each individual is gifted in a variety of ways. His or her own desires and beliefs activate certain abilities and ignore others.

Ruburt’s Cézanne material therefore comes very quickly, taking a bare portion of the day. Yet its quality is such that professional art critics could learn from it, though some of their productions might take much longer periods of time, and result from an extensive conscious knowledge of art, which Ruburt almost entirely lacks. The productions of the psyche by their nature, therefore, burst aside many most cherished beliefs.