“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

9
The Inner Senses — Rob’s Turn

I also sensed, or felt, a great chute or trough or pathway of some kind that reached down into me from above me, or at least from outside of me. At this point, I definitely was apprehensive. The sensation in my chest was very strong. I even thought that perhaps I was having some sort of physical attack, though I felt no pain.

She is always slightly dubious and doubtful before a session … since she is the one through whom I speak. The inner senses are not accustomed to operating so freely, and this sometimes upsets the all-present ego. Usually in our sessions, one inner sense is in strong operation. … Often, just beforehand Ruburt does not have a thought in his head … and then my ‘excellent’ dissertations begin, if you will forgive a touch of egoism on my part. He wants to know where the words are coming from and still wonders if I am a part of his subconscious; and I must admit that I find such an idea appalling. He wants his answers given to him in a way that his conscious mind can understand. This is our twenty-fourth session, and I am still trying to give you the answers.

This last was given with rich mock humor. Seth went on to explain that great dimension would be given to the sessions as we progressed. He began to go into the inner senses more thoroughly and Rob really pricked up his ears, hoping that Seth would mention his three recent experiences. Were they the results of his fumbling attempts to use the inner senses?

There is an inner sense, Joseph, that, in a vague manner, corresponds to your own inner images. That is, you use this inner sense quite inadvertently in your visions, except that because of your lack of consistent training, you see these only dimly.

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?

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.

Now if you’re ready, I have a few words to say about your beautiful, if haphazard, experience with the inner senses the other evening.

What you experienced is rather difficult to explain until we have a thorough discussion of the inner senses, but I will give you a simple explanation for now. You felt an onrush — or should I say an onslaught? — of data in its pure form, rushing through the inner senses like a wind in a kaleidoscope because you did not know how to control or disentangle it.

For this reason, you attempted a rather hilarious feat. You tried to switch over and pick up inside data with the outer senses, and then project this inward. For a beginner, it was quite a performance. … It was a defect on the receiving end that caused fear on your part. You felt sound. But, because you did not hear sound with your ears, you panicked and formed the image of mouths that could not speak. This was a projection of your inability and should not be taken as any condition of helplessness existing in the inner world, as I am afraid you interpreted the image.

Since you are both tired, I will end the session. Don’t say that I didn’t lead you a merry chase tonight, for when you reread the material, you will see that it must be studied carefully. One point, however: conscious fear is usually the main hindrance as far as inner data is concerned. Therefore, a realization that these senses belong to you and that they are quite natural, will help you avoid the closing off of such data by the conscious mind.