“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This difference in immediacy is rather important for our consideration of the inner senses. This is also why I mentioned that the ears and the eyes, while connected with the body, are directed outward. They bring data to the body but very seldom do they collect data from the body. I am beginning to get into some material that is relatively difficult to explain, considering that I must take all of your camouflage patterns into consideration.

It is true that I have lived as a human being, but this is simply a fact. This meeting and our other meetings are not seances, and your experiments with your friend Mark are not seances, according to the implications usually given. So-called seances, when they are legitimate, are simply exercises in the use of the inner senses.

I have more or less avoided giving you the kind of so-called evidence that would be so handy in explaining me to others. I helped you one night to keep your interest high. This occurred during the beginning of our sessions. I am also a personality in myself. I am not going to run around in circles, perform tricks, move rings, throw rocks and so forth. This material is legitimate, speaks for itself, and I will not embellish an otherwise sensible and excellent performance with circus tactics to impress those who will not be impressed under any circumstances.

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.

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.

I am not going to keep you too long this evening in any case. However I do want to mention the fact that the inner senses are capable of expansion and of focus in a way that the outer senses are not. They simply extend further, though I am speaking now in your terms rather than my own. And as to where the inner world actually is on your plane, I will go into that at our next session.

(It might be worth noting that during this session we did not have our window shades pulled as we used to do. Also, Jane’s eyes did not appear to be as dark as usual.)