“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Had I been using Seth’s “inner senses” in the Bronson experience? If we tried to renew the contact, could we get her to give us some checkable dates? I decided to try once more. On January 25th, Rob and I sat in the living room with this in mind. After a short time, I began to speak as Malba. I mentioned this experience briefly in How To Develop Your ESP Power, but here I’m including Rob’s notes which provide a fuller version of the event and our attitude toward it at the time.

Supposedly it was here where she met her husband, who was a foreman in the plant. He died in 1962 in Marlboro, England. He was not English himself but was visiting relatives there. While her husband worked in the factory, he also owned a farm outside of Decatur, and after marriage the couple moved there. The ground was poor, and Malba mentioned the place several times in a rather derogatory way.

They were married twenty-eight years and had a son and daughter. The son is still alive, in California, around the Los Angeles area. Malba didn’t know where the daughter was, but she did know that her son now had two boys of his own. She told us that she worked in the factory for only a few months. Although obviously not intelligent, she showed an awareness of her comparative ignorance, and she regarded education as important.

She couldn’t explain much about her own situation, however, though she insisted that she was happier where she was than she had been in this life. Sometimes she was with others; sometimes alone. She didn’t know how she ‘got about,’ but knew that she could travel to other places on earth. ‘I don’t know how I do it,’ she said. ‘I’ll just find myself somewhere.’ Nor could she describe how she got through to us. ‘I’m here, though, aren’t I?’ she said.

Actually she was fairly inarticulate. She did say that she had no particular sense of light and dark, or sense of time. She remarked quite spiritedly that I asked a lot of questions, but added that she liked us because we didn’t make fun of her.

“Everything that she said was of a piece,” Rob told me later. “She sounded well-meaning, but not too bright. The impression that she was herself was definite … she didn’t seem anything like you. Her laugh was completely different … as was her way of using words. Her vocabulary was very limited, for example, and her voice had a petulant tone. The description of her death really struck me. It was so stark and undramatic that it really rang a bell. Not only that, but she still seemed bewildered by it herself.”

“But what’s the point of it, providing it was legitimate, just for the sake of argument?” I said. “I guess I’ll ‘specialize’ with Seth. I can’t see just trying to pull people in, if that’s an apt phrase, for nothing.”

But I still couldn’t quite believe in personal life after death. I preferred to think of our psychic experiences as emphasizing, instead, the unknown abilities of our present consciousness. “The Seth material could be coming from some deep inner source, an intuitive bank of inner knowledge available to everyone if they only look for it,” I said. “And just maybe, with the Malba episode, I picked up knowledge of her life from the same source.”

“But you’re sure that Seth is … an individual. I admit he seems to be.”

The elements — those that you now know and those you will create — are camouflages of the basic stuff or vitality which you cannot discover with your outer senses. Your scientists will find that their tools are no longer adequate. Because man has such a sense of curiosity, scientists will be forced finally to use the inner senses. Otherwise they will be dealing with camouflage only and find themselves in a blind alley — not because their eyes are closed, but because they are not using the right set of eyes.

Effects would seem to be evidence. … In concrete terms, if a tree branch moves, then you take it for granted that something blows it. You know wind by its effects. No one has seen wind, but since its effects are so observable, it would be idiocy to say that it did not exist. Therefore, you will come up against the basic stuff of the universe and feel its effects, though your physical senses will not necessarily perceive it.

Granted, camouflage is, in itself, an effect. If you look at the observable world you can learn something about the inner one, but only if you take into consideration the existence of camouflage distortion. … There is so much to be said here, and you have so much to learn, that sometimes I have to admit that I’m appalled.

Your own experience with creativity should help you out here. When you paint a picture, my dear Joseph, you are dealing with a transformation of energy and transformation of camouflage pattern. There is a brief but vital moment when you are dealing with the underlying vitality of which I have spoken.

You are forced to transform this creative energy into another camouflage pattern because of your earthly situation. There is nothing else you can do. But for this moment, you pluck this vitality from the inner senses. Then you transform it into a somewhat different, more evocative, new camouflage pattern that is, nevertheless, more fluent, more fluid than the usual pattern, and gives greater freedom and mobility to the vitality itself. You approach a transmigration of plane.

Your scientists can count their elements, and while they are on the wrong track, they will discover more and more elements until they are ready to go out of their minds. And while they create instruments to deal with smaller and smaller particles, they will see smaller and smaller particles, seemingly without end. As their instruments reach further into the physical universe, they will see further and further, but they will automatically and unconsciously transform what they apparently see into the camouflage patterns with which they are familiar. They will be, and are, prisoners of their tools.

It is not a matter of inventing new instruments any longer, but of using the ‘invisible’ ones you have. These may be known and examined. This material itself is evidence. It is like the branch that moves, so that you know the wind by its effects; and a windbag like me by the billowing gale of my monologues.

You might say that the brain is the mind in camouflage. Imagination belongs to the mind, not the brain. Instruments may be used to force imagination to move along in terms of its owner’s personal memories, but it cannot be forced to move along the lines of conceptual thoughts because the imagination is a connective between the physical individual and the nonphysical entity.

Mental enzymes, by the way, have a chemical effect or reaction on your plane, but the effect itself is, of course, distortion. On the other planes, the distortion effect may not be chemical at all. … If you are tired, I will close the session.

“I know it.” Suddenly I felt giddy and full of fun, struck again by the incongruity of the whole affair. “Two adults waiting for an invisible personality to tell them about an invisible world, waiting for instructions on how to use inner senses,” I said. “Sometimes I feel like an explorer, mapping out paths to an ancient forgotten dimension of reality. I can even feel reverberations beneath everyday activities, like clues that I only sense but still can’t really perceive. And then sometimes I’m besieged by doubts.”

The ears can be trained to some degree into a sound-awareness pertaining to the body itself. And breathing, for example, can be magnified to an almost frightening degree when one concentrates upon listening to his own breath. But, as a rule, the ears neither listen to nor hear the inner sounds of the body.

The sense of smell also seems to leap forward. A man can smell quite a stink, even though it is not right under his nose. The sense of touch does not seem to leap out in this manner. Unless the hand itself presses upon a surface, then you do not feel that you have touched it. Touch usually involves contact of a direct sort. You can, of course, feel the invisible wind against your cheek, but touch involves an immediacy different from the distant perceptions of sight and smell. I am sure you realize these points yourself.

The physical body is a camouflage pattern operating in a larger camouflage pattern. But the body and all camouflage patterns are also transformers of the vital inner stuff of the universe, enabling it to operate under new and various conditions.

I am repeating myself, but I want this to be clear. This vital data is sent to the mind by the inner senses. Any information that is important to the body’s contact with outer camouflage is given to the brain.

Time and space are both camouflage patterns. The inner senses conquer time and space, but this is hardly surprising because time and space do not exist for them. There is no time and space. Therefore, nothing is conquered. The camouflage simply is not present. …