“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We had been speculating about spending our immediately-past lives in Boston, since Seth had hinted at this in the last session. We opened the session by sitting silently at the board, but Jane began to receive Seth even as the pointer spelled out his greeting. She laid the board aside and began to dictate in a normal voice, pacing as usual.)

It is as if a man found himself in a completely dark room, into which no sounds came. And he looked down, could not see his body, could not hear his voice, and therefore deduced that he had no body and no voice, even though he knew he had both a body and a voice before he entered that room. But he says “I will at any moment believe only what I can see, and though I am sure that I saw more at one time, now I can see nothing and so I have no body, since I cannot see it.”

With the hands that he does not think he has, our imaginary man then feels the contours of his body. But does this help him in his dilemma? No. He yells witchcraft. If someone else says “Oh, I feel a body,” he says “You are a medium.” Or, if you prefer, a crackpot. The fact remains that you have within yourself the evidence.

But since it is so difficult for man to even recognize the self that moves his own muscles and breathes his own breath, then I suppose it should not be startling that he cannot realize that this whole self also forms the camouflage world of physical appearance, in almost the same manner that he forms a pattern with his breath upon a glass pane.

Without knowing what he was doing Ruburt has been developing his inner senses to an almost amazing degree, but naturally he did this unknowingly, pursuing other aims. In the past he was so bound to the conscious ego that in fiction he found it difficult to write anything that was not strictly autobiographical.

The poetry has always been the result of facility in use of the inner senses, but until lately he was unable to give this sufficient pattern in terms of unitary form. His efforts in the book The Physical World as Idea Construction represented a breakthrough on his part. He realized, I believe, from the beginning that the conscious critical mind had little to do with the initial conception.

The fact is, he sees although no one taught him how to see. And the part of himself that did teach him to see still guides his movements, still moves the muscles of his eyes, still becomes conscious despite him when he sleeps, still breathes for him without thanks, without recognition, and still carries on his task of transforming energy from an inner reality to an outer camouflage.

He becomes trapped by his own artificially-divided self. He looks for gods, anything at all, to explain perfectly natural functions that belong to him. This beautifully absolves him in his own eyes from all responsibility, but it does not. I have been speaking here only, if you will believe it, of personalities in their particular lives as they operate on your plane, and I have much to say.

Nor do I know all the answers. It is however a fact that even mankind, in his blundering manner, will discover that he himself creates his own physical universe, and that the mechanisms of the physical body have more functions and varieties than he knows. Nor in the sleeping state are these functions stilled. They continue in an even more direct form than they do when he is awake. He creates when he dreams in a truer and less distorted fashion, and his physical world is much more the product of his dreaming self than it is of his waking state.