“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is not a matter, either, of there simply being one other category of knowledge, for there are numerous other such categories, many of them biologically within your reach. Various so-called esoteric traditions provide certain methods that allow an individual to set aside accepted modes of perception, and offer patterns that may be used as containers for these other kinds of knowledge. Even these containers must necessarily shape the information received, however. (Pause.) Some such methods are very advantageous, yet they have also become too rigid and autocratic, allowing little room for deviation. Dogmas are then set up about them so that only a certain body of data is considered acceptable. The systems no longer have the flexibility that first gave them birth.

The kind of knowledge upon which you depend needs verbalization. It is very difficult for you to consider the accumulation of any kind of knowledge without the use of language as you understand it. Even your remembered dreams are often verbalized constructs. You may also use images, but these are familiar images, born of the educated and hence prejudiced physical perceptions. Those remembered dreams have meaning and are very valuable, but they are already organized for you to some extent, and put into a shape that you can somewhat recognize.

(Pause.) I said earlier that there were many kinds of knowledge. Think of them instead as states of knowledge. Perception of any of these takes a consciousness attuned to each. In my “waking” condition, I operate at many levels of consciousness at once, and deal therefore with different systems of knowledge. In my “dream” condition, or rather conditions, I form links of consciousness that combine these various systems, creatively forming them into new versions. “Waking” again, I become consciously aware of those activities, and use them to add to the dimensions of my usual state, creatively expanding my experience of reality. What I learn is transmitted automatically to others like me, and their knowledge is transmitted to me.

These minds all work together to keep you alive through the physical structure of the brain. When you use all of these minds, then and only then do you become fully aware of your surroundings: You perceive reality more clearly than you do now, more sharply, brilliantly, and concisely. At the same time, however, you comprehend it directly. You comprehend what it is apart from your physical perception of it. You accept as yourself those other states of consciousness native to your other minds. You achieve true personhood.

(Seth immediately began a short discussion of a dream Jane had last night. She hardly remembered it, but wrote in her notebook this morning that she knew it involved a new, rather odd kind of perception that she couldn’t verbalize at all. Since this fits in with Seth’s chapter here, I’m including his comments:)

The Cézanne material, the dream and the painting, are all aspects of another kind of perception. Your joint library experiments^* helped set the stage, as you added your encouragement. All of this will help Ruburt toward a nonverbal comprehension that will, on another level, reorganize some of his beliefs.

This type of perception cannot be described until he forms suitable verbal patterns that can come only with further experience. In this, I am a touchstone. He accelerates mentally to a certain degree, and that puts him in touch with me — an additional energy source. He activates certain portions of the brain that connect it to another mind, that people do not as yet realize they possess.