“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Rob spent the next Saturday afternoon in his studio, as usual, painting and doing other artwork. It was snowing slightly. I was in the front of the apartment doing the weekly housecleaning. Rob’s mind was on some innocuous chore, now forgotten; he may have been applying gesso ground to a series of panels to be used for paintings. With no transition or advance notice, a vision appeared to him. Although it was not exteriorized, it was clear in detail and very vivid. Like other experiences of this nature, it was intrusive, in that it seemed to have no connection with what he was doing or thinking at the time.

With the vision came its explanation. Rob “knew” that he was seeing the bedroom in which his brother, Dick, had died in a past life in England. We had already been given some information about this previous existence of Dick’s in an earlier Seth session. The vision was so clear that Rob instantly made a quick sketch of it. Later in the day he matted it and put it on the bookcase just before we began our twenty-first session.

It was a fascinating session. Seth told Rob that he’d seen only part of the room, described the rest of it and gave further details about Dick’s English life. The session lasted until 11:15 when Rob, not Seth, got tired, and suggested that we stop for the night. Seth said, Sleepy time is no crime. Now I am no poet, and you know it. Rob laughed, because Seth likes to tease me about my poetry.

Rob’s vision was spontaneous. When he typed up Seth’s material on the first inner sense, though, he tried a simple deliberate experiment. It is one that I now use with my beginning students though then, of course, it was new to us. Here are Rob’s notes:

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!

“No kidding,” Rob said, as if he knew.

“Uh, He says that he always enjoyed the lively art of conversation,” I said. The dish towel was still in my hand. Rob looked at me and laughed.

I was in trance almost at once. Well, the chickadees must be restless tonight, Seth began. Incidentally, I rarely attend your little apartment unless in one way or another you ask me to, and tonight you were yelling my name from the rooftops, he said.

(Seth’s preference here, incidentally, is the direct opposite of my own feeling on the matter. He uses emotional inflections delivering the material that greatly add to the meaning of the words themselves, however, and he may have had this in mind. Words really come to life as he speaks them.)

It is true that Joseph receives much more data through inner visions. In the past, he has more or less translated this data automatically, without realizing it, into paintings, with no memory of any vision at all. You can learn to use the other inner senses as well, Joseph, and I will tell you more about them.

Because Ruburt deals in words, it is easy for me to communicate in this way. He automatically translates inner data given by me into coherent, valid and faithful camouflage patterns. The data that I give is not actually sound on my part. Its transference is automatic and instantaneous on Ruburt’s part, and is performed through the inner workings of the mind, the inner senses and the brain.

Seth went on to say, jokingly, that I had been blocking information about my own family. Then he said to Rob,

Seth was very jovial; he and Rob joked back and forth.

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!

It is fashionable in your time to consider man as the product of the brain and an isolated bit of the subconscious, with a few other odds and ends thrown in for good measure. Therefore, with such an unnatural division, it seems to man that he does not know himself.

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.

If man does not know who breathes within him, and if man does not know who dreams within him, it is not because there is one self who acts in the physical universe and another who dreams and breathes. It is because he has buried the part of himself which breathes and dreams. If these functions seem so automatic as to be performed by someone completely divorced from himself, it is because he has done the divorcing.

Seth went on to emphasize again that we form the world of appearances as effortlessly and unconsciously as we breathe. Then he said,

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.

The fact is that although no one taught him to see, he sees. The part of himself that did ‘teach’ him to see still guides his movements, still moves the muscles of his eyes, still becomes conscious despite him when he sleeps, still breathes for him without thanks or recognition and still carries on his task of transforming energy from an inner reality into an outer one. Man becomes trapped by his own artifically divided self.

Then, just as Rob was about to ask how we could really perceive the inner realities, Seth began to discuss the second inner sense, giving us a valuable tool for our subjective dissections. We later discovered, of course, the “inner senses” and “psychological time” had been discussed under different names in many ancient manuscripts. Rob was really impatient to get the session typed up so that he could study the material and put it to use.

The outer senses will not help man achieve the inner purpose that drives him. Unless he uses the inner senses, he may lose whatever he has gained. …

The mover, the breather, the dreamer
Shares with me this fond flesh.
He is a twin so like myself
That I cannot recognize his face.
He goes his way and I go mine.
We never meet head-on, and yet
I am aware of this ghost
Behind my every word or act.
Who moves? Who breathes?
Who dreams?

If the twenty-third session roused me to write the poem, it also impressed Rob deeply enough so that he tried a rather complicated experiment with the inner senses — without letting his conscious mind know what he was up to.