“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

More About Psychological Time
and How to Use It
Excerpts From Sessions 24, 27 and 28
Miss Cummingham and a Missed Session

The inner senses, however, give much stronger impressions than those given by the outer ones. You should, in the future, be able to achieve the counterparts of sight, sound, smell and touch, embellished by inner counterparts of width and existence, using the inner senses. You have trouble now with the duration of your inner visions because you are trying to transpose them according to physical time — and this is going about it in the wrong way. As I mentioned earlier, you have at your command, even now, an inroad, a relatively accessible one, in what is termed psychological time.

This is closely related to the second inner sense, and it is upon psychological time that you must try to transpose your inner visions. You can see how handicapped we both are because of the difficulties involved in trying to explain inner data in terms of outer data. For instance, when I tell you that the second inner sense is like your sense of time, this does give you some understanding of what psychological time is like, but you are apt to compare the two too closely.

Any communications coming through the inner senses will exist in your psychological time. Psychological time operates during sleep and quiet hours of consciousness. Now, in dreams you may have the feeling of experiencing many hours or even days. These days or hours of psychological experience are not recorded by the physical body and are outside of the physical time camouflage. If, in a dream, you experience a period of three days, physically you do not age for these days. Do you see?

Psychological time is so a part of inner reality that even though the inner self is still connected to the body, you are, in the dream framework, free of some very important physical effects. Now, as dreams seem to involve you in duration that is independent of clock time, so can you achieve the actual experience of duration as far as your inner visions are concerned.

Originally, psychological time allowed man to live in the inner and outer worlds with relative ease … and man felt much closer to his environment. In prehistoric times, mankind evolved the ego to help him deal with camouflage patterns that he had, himself, created. This is no contradiction, as will be explained later. He did the job so well that even when he had things well under control, he was not satisfied. He developed at a lopsided level. The inner senses led him into a reality he could not manipulate as easily as he could physical camouflage, and he feared what he thought of as a loss of mastery.

When the session resumed, Rob asked, “Can you tell us more about psychological time?”

It is a natural connective to the inner world. As you can experience days or hours within its framework in the dream state and not age for the comparable amount of physical time, so as you develop, you will be able to rest and be refreshed within psychological time even when you are awake. This will aid your mental and physical state to an amazing degree. You will discover an added vitality and a decreased need to sleep. Within any given five minutes of clock time, for example, you may find an hour of resting which is independent of clock time.

You can look through psychological time at clock time and even use clock time then to your greater advantage; but without the initial recognition of psychological time, clock time becomes a prison. … A proper use of psychological time will not only lead you to inner reality but will prevent you from being rushed in the physical world. It provides quiet and peacefulness.

If you remember this, inner data will come through much more easily, and you will be able to control it. It is never of itself overpowering. You can train yourself in the recognition of such data, its utilization and control. Within the framework of psychological time you can also lengthen such experiences.