“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Imagine a man in an automobile who passes our man at the corner. Now when our man in the automobile reaches the tree he is further ahead, so to speak, in distance. He is also in some respects further ahead in time, yet actually he is not. That is, the man on the corner has watched him pass by. He is beyond the man on the corner in space. The man on the corner at the same time sees the motorist drive beyond. But although he sees him pass in space he knows that they exist, he and the motorist, simultaneously even though usually the idea of passing on involves time.

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.

Now our man would not vaguely sense these objects, he would feel them. He would be sensitive to them, in other words, while not touching them with anything like physical hands, as for example you feel heat or cold without necessarily touching ice or fire.

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.

He would in no way lose consciousness of who he was, and he would perceive these experiences, again, somewhat in the same manner that you perceive heat and cold. In your camouflage pattern you must adapt yourself to the effects of heat and cold, but our man in the inner world would not be under any such obligation. I am speaking now only of our first inner sense.