“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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:

Then, last night, I stood at the window and looked out across the Walnut Street Bridge. I visualized myself walking across it and felt the wooden flooring beneath my feet. I felt myself walk beneath the signal light at the far end of the bridge and let myself continue on along the street. Finally I tried to reach out and envelop the feeling of the houses and trees on either side of me — to sense them as if by inner touch, as I passed each one by.

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.)

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.

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.

Rob laughed and went into the studio for one.

I just snorted when Rob told me about this data after the session. Still, the session impressed me. For one thing, since it was spontaneous rather than planned, I hadn’t been at all nervous. For another, afterwards I felt surrounded by a residue of Seth’s good-humored affection. This feeling was directed at me as well as at Rob, which meant that it wasn’t coming from me. After the session was over, it seemed to follow me out into the kitchen while I finished the dishes.

Our regular session was due the next night and lasted, as usual, from 9:00 until after 11:30. I always want to give this particular session a title: “The Breather and the Dreamer,” because as a result of the session, I wrote a poem with that title — one of three poems inspired by Seth’s discussion that night. The session had quite a different effect on Rob, however, as you’ll see in the next chapter.

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.

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.

Because you know that you breathe, without being consciously aware of the mechanics involved, you are forced to admit that you do your own breathing. When you cross a room, you are forced to admit that you have caused yourself to do so, though consciously you have no idea of willing the muscles to move, or of stimulating one tendon or another. Yet even though you admit these things, you do not really believe them.

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.

And while I speak to you, my lungs
Rise and fall behind breastbones,
Fill their secret tissue mouths
With the air that swirls in this bright room.
They breathe for me the very breath
Upon which all I am depends,
Yet I do not know how this is done.
Who is this ghost,
This other one?
Who moves the lung? Who breathes?

While I sleep and lie stretched out,
Eyelids closed and pupils dark,
Who walks wide-eyed downstairs
Through the door in the cold night air,
And travels where I have never been?
Who leaves clear memories in my head
Of people I have never met?
Who takes these trips while I
Never lift one inch from bed?
Who dreams?