“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the next session, Seth told Rob that he was doing well and should try the exercise often. The session, the twenty-second, was one of our first spontaneous sessions. (At times, I knew I could have a session, for example, but mentally refused. Two sessions a week were more than sufficient, I thought — I was afraid of going into trance at the drop of a hat.)

He was right, of course. In those days, I’d put him on probation and myself as well. And I never tried to visualize him. I could reconcile a mental voice as a valid and quite safe mechanism of the creative subconscious, as I liked to call it — but an image next to me in the kitchen while I did the dishes? Never!

This method suits me temperamentally. It seems to me that automatic writing could become like an institution. It is so one-sided. I enjoy the questions that you do manage to get in. Often they remind me of other things I would like to say … I have never trusted the written word half as much as I trust the spoken word, and on your plane it is difficult to trust either, but as I mentioned, I always enjoyed conversation, which is the liveliest of the arts.

During all this time the curtains were open. It was not yet quite dark. There were voices and footsteps in the hall, Rob told me later, but I was not bothered at all. In fact, quite without knowing it, I was pacing about, talking as Seth, carrying an unlit cigarette. Finally Seth said, This is a very pleasant little session. For heaven’s sake, Ruburt, get yourself a match. The suspension and suspense is killing me. Will she or won’t she light that cigarette? Please find a match.

The problem is not only to receive data through the inner senses in an undistorted, coherent manner, but also to translate this into the particular camouflage patterns with which you are familiar. …

There is so much to say, Seth said once. I could run on for hours, but you would probably catch me. … It is fun to tease you. I always did, and you taunted me back.

It wasn’t safe to play around with Ruburt in such a manner, ever. When you weren’t looking he was apt to hit you over the head with a rock for something you had said ten years ago, and completely forgotten. Not really a rock, but you get the idea. Some things about a personality never change!

He says, ‘I breathe, but who breathes, since consciously I cannot tell myself to breathe or not to breathe?’ He says, ‘I dream. But who dreams? I cannot tell myself to dream or not to dream.’ He cuts himself in half and then wonders why he is not whole. Man has admitted only those things he could see, smell, touch or hear; and in so doing, he could only appreciate half of himself. And when I say half, I exaggerate; he is aware of only a third of himself.

As breathing is carried on in a manner that seems automatic to the conscious mind, so the important function of transforming the vitality of the universe into pattern units seems to be carried on automatically. But this transformation is not as apparent to the one part of yourself that you are pleased to recognize, and so it seems as if this transformation is carried on by someone even more distant than your breathing and dreaming selves.

Man, for example, trusts himself much more when he says ‘I will read,’ and then he reads, than he does when he says, ‘I will see,’ and then he sees. He remembers having learned to read, but he does not remember having learned to see, and what he cannot consciously remember, he fears.

It is convenient not to be consciously aware of each breath you take, but it is sheer stupidity to ignore the inner self which does the breathing and is aware of the mechanics involved. I have said that the mind is a part of the inner world, but you have access to your own minds, which you ignore; and this access would lead you inevitably to truths about the outer world. Working inward, you could understand the outward more clearly.

Time to your dreaming self is much like ‘time’ to your waking inner self. The time concept in dreams may seem far different than your conception of time in the waking state when you have your eyes on the clock and are concerned with getting to some destination by, say, 12:15. But it is not so different from time in the waking state when you are sitting alone with your thoughts. Then, I am sure, you will see the similarity between this alone sort of inner psychological time, experienced often in waking hours, and the sense of time experienced often in a dream. …

I cannot say this too often — you are far more than the conscious mind, and the self which you do not admit is the portion that not only insures your own physical survival in the physical universe which it has made, but which is also the connective between yourself and inner reality. … It is only through the recognition of the inner self that the race of man will ever use its potential.

When Rob typed up the session and I read it, I went around in a daze of wonder. Like many other people, I’d distrusted the “inner” self to a considerable degree, believing that it held only repressed primitive emotions and buried, unsavory characteristics. But without it, we couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning or breathe, much less walk across the floor. Now this seems so obvious that it is almost impossible to remember what a revelation it seemed at the time. The next day, the session inspired me to write the following poem.