“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your eyes, while belonging to the body, cannot see within the body. The ears can be trained to some degree by neurotic individuals into a sound awareness pertaining to the body itself. Breathing for example can be magnified to an almost frightening degree when one concentrates upon listening to his own breath. But as a rule the ears neither listen to nor hear the inner sounds of the body.

The sense of smell also seems to leap forward. A man can smell quite a stink, even though it is not right under his nose. The sense of touch, as you are consciously familiar with it, does not seem to leap out in this manner. Unless the hand itself presses upon a surface in some manner then you do not feel that you have touched it. Touch usually involves contact of a direct sort. You can of course feel the invisible wind against your cheek, but touch involves an immediacy different from the distant perceptions of sight and smell.

Imagine a man standing on a corner, looking down the street at a tree a block away. He need not walk that distance in order to know what is there since he can see everything between himself and the tree, at least as far as large objects are concerned. His sense of sight allows him this freedom.

If you will imagine the rather odd picture of a solid beam extending from the body of the man on the corner to the tree, then this may help you to think of sight as a path. This particular path exists in space for man A, who is at the corner. If man A hears the screech of brakes there is an interval of time existing between the sound and his awareness of it. Consider this as another solid beam or path.

Now with that out of the way, we can consider the inner senses as paths leading to an inner reality. However, here we are not concerned with space or time. If you were, or if man A was blind, he would not see the tree in question. If he were deaf he would not hear the car. Let us pretend this state of events, and let us compare the physical objects between our man and his tree to points somewhat corresponding to them in the inner world. It would be as if instead of seeing the various houses or whatever, our man instead felt them. If you remember, I mentioned earlier that your outer sense of touch was extremely immediate, in a way that sight was not, and I also gave you immediacy as one of the qualities of the inner senses.

This sense would permit our man to feel the basic sensations felt by the tree, so that instead of looking at the tree his consciousness would expand to contain the experience of what it is like to be a tree. According to his proficiency, in a like manner he would feel the experience of being the intervening grass and so forth.