“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Besides normal reasons (Jane dictates:) he was psychically inclined, at a time when Jane was young and herself close to a past life. She sensed his deep and personal inner awareness. It confused and haunted him, since his inarticulateness applied also to thoughts within himself. He felt strongly but could not explain. In his solitary nature he came close to being a mystic but he was unable to relate his personality as Joseph Burdo with the social world at large, or even to the other members of his family. There was a block, regrettably. He felt strongly his connection with the universe as a whole and with nature as he understood it. But to him nature did not include his fellow human beings. The solitariness that besieged him—because it did besiege him—is dangerous to any personality unless it comes after identification with the human race.

Keep your regular work habits intact. I know I need not tell you this, far be it from me when I know your habits so well. When you were worldly you were the fleshiest man I knew. Now in your compensation you show the same tenacity of purpose.

As to your jottings this morning concerning art, very good, I commend you. You are already beginning to think in new and wider concepts. As your paintings are solidified feeling on board or paper, apparent in the physical universe and therefore vulnerable to the laws of that universe, so is the universe itself on your plane physical materialized feeling, only with more dimension than a drawing or a painting. There is however also an extra dimension in a painting than people usually recognize, beside the lines and color and form and content, which are as you said so aptly feeling solidified. You have the action of which you also spoke. First you have the action of the lines, form and content and so forth, caught and solidified, then as an observer looks at a painting feeling is again motion moving out from the painting into the beholder’s perception.

(The reader will note that I did not ask Seth to comment on my writings concerning art, but that the subject came up during the monologue. I had given Jane my copy to read earlier in the day. We wondered if this method of acquainting both of us with involved questions before the session began might not save asking the question during the session itself.

Everything on your plane is a materialization of something that exists independent of your plane. Therefore within your senses there are other senses that perceive inward. Your regular senses perceive, or as Jane would like to say create, an outer world. The senses within them, that is within the recognizable senses, perceive and create an inner world, they perceive part of an inner world. This is difficult for me to explain to you. However as your regular senses are limited according to the plane which you inhabit—in your case dear friends on your plane extremely limited, I’m afraid—so are the corresponding inner senses limited.

The time element is something I told you I would discuss, and if my intentions are strong Ruburt at this point is growing weak. And there is a certain element of time in this statement. The material itself has not made either of you weary. Time involved, or your idea of the time involved, has.

But this referral itself involves time. The time that you spend watching such a historic moment takes up an identical amount of time in the present. Therefore one minute of such a past referral costs you one minute of present time. Also you end up short-changed. You give up your precious moment in the present but you do not have a complete moment of the past to show for it.

I have said also that this feeling of vitality, and I prefer the term vitality, is moving and itself a part of the living stuff of the universe. Now as these wires pass seemingly from plane to plane they actually form the boundaries of each plane and become subject to the particular laws of the plane. Therefore they become subject to time on your plane. And they become subject to other laws, if not laws of time, on other planes.

The motion of the apparently solidified vitality gives the illusion of time. The counteraction involved in this case is counteraction within the core of vitality itself, in much the same manner that we spoke of a closed mental enclosure, multiplying and setting up motion within itself.

Feeling acts in many worlds. It is the connective and it strongly connects the three of us. If I sound ponderous it is only because these necessary explanations cannot be given to you in a playful manner. You would discount them. And my dear Joseph, at times I peek in on you between sessions. The twist is a beautifully innocent and wicked contortion that I would enjoy.

(We began talking in the living room. I mentioned being able to put myself in a dissociated state at the gallery when things got sticky, and said this saved lots of effort on my part. My voice seemed to get hoarse and husky as I spoke; I laughed and commented that I hoped Seth wasn’t going to start using my voice when he wanted to.

(Rob made coffee for me. I didn’t believe I could lift the cup. When I finally did my motions were extremely slow, as in a motion picture played slow. It seemed impossible to exert any pressure in the physical world at all. Rob made me drink two cups of coffee; I stood with my head out the window in the cold night air. Nothing seemed to help. I was thoroughly frightened by now, yet thought that I could snap out of it if I really wanted to; and knew how to.

(My condition: A feeling of weightlessness, of inability to function in the physical world, yet because my motions were so strange this gave Rob the impression that my limbs were heavy; to me they were light as air. I felt relaxed to the ninth degree. Yet all the while my senses were amazingly alert and I conversed with Rob more or less normally. My body seemed to have no physical resistance. When Rob took my hand it was very wet and floppy.