“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Physically your body has a stance in space and time. I will speak of primary and secondary experience. Let us call primary experience that which exists immediately in sense terms in your moment of time — the contact of body with environment. I am creating certain divisions here to make our discussion — or (with a smile) monologue — easier. Therefore, I will call secondary experience that information that comes to you through, say, reading, television, discussion with others, letters, and so forth.

The secondary kind of experience is largely symbolic. This should be clear. Reading about a war in the middle of a quiet sunny afternoon is not the same thing as being in the war, however vivid the description. Reading about the energy shortage is not the same as sitting in a cold house. Reading about the possible annihilation of mankind through nuclear destruction or other stupidities, while you are sitting calmly enough in your living room, is obviously far divorced from the actuality described in an article.

Your conscious mind is meant to give your body an assessment of what I will call cultural conditions, for there are sophistications and specifications that in your terms consciousness alone can assess. If, under conditions naturally safe in the terms of primary experience, you become overwhelmed by unsafe signals from secondary experience — that is, from your reading or whatever — you show a lack of discrimination. You are not able to differentiate between the physically safe present situation, and the imagined, which is perhaps unsafe, calling forth the alarms of danger.

Your body then might say you are safe, and your senses show you that no danger is present — yet you have begun to rely so upon secondary experience that you do not trust your creature reactions.

To do this, rely upon your immediate sense data, not secondary experience as described. That primary sense data, while pinpointed in the present, providing you with the necessary stance in time, still can open up to you the timelessness from which all time emerges, can bring you intuitive intimations, hinting at the true nature of the ever-present coming-to-be of the universe.

Often then you ignore your senses’ reality in the world — the luxurious vitality and comfort of the daily moment — by exaggerating the importance of secondary experience as defined for this discussion.

In those terms, the ever-actual integrity of nature everywhere surrounds you. It represents your direct experience. It offers comfort, creativity, and inspiration that you only impede if you allow secondary experience to supersede your daily moment-to-moment encounter with the physical earth.