“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Her maiden name was Shilcock. She grew up with an aunt and older brother, married at eighteen and worked in a dress or textile plant in Decatur, South Dakota. She could not describe her duties. We had great trouble with the name ‘Decatur.’ This is my interpretation of what she said, and now I wonder if I made a mistake. Her pronounciation was something like Dek-a-tur, with the accent on the first syllable.

According to what she told us, she died in the farmhouse kitchen. She was standing at the sink washing dishes and looking out at the ‘dreary’ flat landscape and at their pickup truck parked there. She felt a sharp pain in her chest, and died of a heart attack. She fell to the floor, breaking a plate as she did so.

She couldn’t explain what she did, except to say that she ‘learned things.’ I asked further questions about her background and was told that her husband had grown alfalfa and wheat and tried tobacco and corn. She said again that he was a poor farmer and that her life had been a lonely one, since she had few friends. She knew the clerks in the town, and that was all. She did tell me, when asked, that Decatur had a population of about twelve thousand.

“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.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Rob said. “If that’s all it is, whose quarrelling with that?”

“Both ideas could be part of the whole solution,” Rob said. “Hopefully, as Seth explains more about the inner senses, we’ll understand more about what’s actually going on and learn some methods that will help us.”

Since very often the vitality or stuff of the universe seems as innocuous as air … then look for what you do not see. Explore places that seem empty, for they are full. Look between events. What you see clearly with the outer senses is camouflage. I am not suggesting that you take all this on faith. I am saying that what seems vacant lacks camouflage, and, therefore, if this is explored, it will yield evidence.

A certain distortion must be expected. The painting, however, achieves a certain freedom from camouflage, although it cannot escape it, and actually hovers between realities in a way that no thoroughly camouflaged object could do. Music and poetry also can achieve this state. …

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.

Scientists realize that the atmosphere of the earth has a distorting effect upon their instruments. What they do not understand is that their instruments themselves are bound to be distortive. Any material instrument will have built-in distortive effects. The one instrument which is more important than any other is the mind (not the brain) … the meeting place of the inner and outer senses.

“I wish he’d get more specific about the inner senses,” I said after I had read the session. “Like — what are they and how do they work?”

“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 outer senses deal mainly with camouflage patterns. The inner senses deal with realities beneath camouflage … and deliver inner information. These inner senses, therefore, are capable of seeing within the body, though the physical eyes cannot. As the senses of sight, sound and smell appear to reach outward, bringing data to the body from an outside observable camouflage pattern, so the inside senses seem to extend far inward, bringing inner reality data to the body. There is also a transforming process involved, much like the moment that we have spoken about in the creation of a painting.

The inner senses, then, deliver data from the inner world of reality to the body. The outer senses deliver data from the outside world of camouflage to the body. However, the inner senses are aware of the body’s own physical data at all times while the outer senses are concerned with the body mainly in its relationship to camouflage environment.

The inner senses have an immediate, constant knowledge of the body in a way that the outer senses do not. The material is delivered to the body from the inner world through the inner senses. This inner data is received by the mind. The mind, being uncamouflaged, then, is the receiving station for the data brought to it by the inner senses. What you have here … are inner nervous and communication systems, closely resembling the outer systems with which you are familiar.

“Seth, what about time?” Rob asked.

I want to give you more detailed information about inner realities themselves. Actually, they do not parallel the outer senses; and this will sound appalling to you, I’m afraid, simply because there is nothing to be seen, heard or touched in the manner in which you are accustomed. I don’t want to give you the idea that existence without your camouflage patterns is bland and innocuous because this is not the case. The inner senses have a strong immediacy, a delicious intensity that your outer senses lack. There is no lapse of time in perception, since there is no time.

He would be using the first inner sense. It involves immediate perception of a direct nature, whose intensity varies according to what is being sensed. It involves instant cognition through what I can only describe as inner vibrational touch.

This sense would permit our man to feel the basic sensations felt by the tree, so that instead of looking at it, his consciousness would expand to contain the experience of what it is to be a tree. According to his proficiency, he would feel in like manner the experience of being the grass and so forth. He would in no way lose consciousness of who he was, and he would perceive these experiences again, somewhat in the same manner that you perceive heat and cold. …

The inner senses are capable of expansion and of focus in a way unknown to the outer ones, and the inner world, of course, is a part of all realities. It is not so much that it exists simultaneously with the outer world, as that it forms the outer world and exists in it also.

When you receive more information on the inner senses, you will begin using them to a much higher degree than you are now. Of course, the inner senses can be used to explore reality that does not yield to the physical senses.