“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The bakery across the street from Throckmorton’s shop was run by a man called Ragan. R-a-g-a-n. He had a wife, five children, and three children who died in their early years. He was a distant cousin of Throckmorton’s, of Irish descent.

In actuality, my dear friends, the all-important “I” does know. You do not know the all-important “I”, and therein lies your difficulty. It is fashionable in your time to consider man, or man’s “I”, as the product of the brain and an isolated bit of the subconscious, with a few odds and ends thrown in for good measure.

Therefore, with such an unnatural division it seems to man that he does not know himself. He says “I breathe, but who breathes, since consciously I cannot tell myself to breathe or not to breathe?” He says “I dream, but who dreams? I cannot tell myself to dream or not to dream.” He cuts himself in half, then wonders why he is not whole. Even in my own lifetimes on your plane I sensed this basic contradiction. Man has consistently admitted to the evidence only those things he could see, smell, touch or hear, and in so doing he could only appreciate half of himself. And when I say half of himself I exaggerate. He is aware of only a third of himself, because two-thirds of himself exists in that realm to which he will not admit.

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.

If man does not know who breathes within him, and if man does not know who dreams within him, it is not because there is one who acts in the physical world and one completely separate who dreams and breathes. It is because he has buried the part of himself which breathes and dreams. If these functions seem so automatic as to be performed by someone completely divorced from himself, it is because he has done the divorcing. This is not the case on all planes. It is not even the case on planes that you might consider lower than your own, nor is it the case with some portions of life that you consider beneath you on your own plane.

I mentioned somewhat earlier that oftentimes the consciousness becomes the subconscious and vice versa. This should certainly come as no surprise. You are familiar with it in your everyday existence. It is not some isolated occurrence that happens once in a lifetime, and yet as a rule mankind has ignored this completely. In sleep the conscious becomes actually the subconscious and the subconscious, in the most real manner, becomes conscious. Every man instinctively knows this simple fact, and yet every man stubbornly refuses to admit it.

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.

It is only through the use of this inner man, through the recognition of the functions of this inner man, that the race will ever use its potential. The outer senses will not help man to achieve the inner purpose which drives him. Empathy is an outer materialization, very superficial, of the first inner sense which we have discussed so briefly.

Unless man learns to use this inner sense he may well lose whatever he has gained. I will say much more along these lines at a later date. I believe I will close the session. I do not want to keep you up too late, although as usual I could keep on for hours. I am extremely pleased that we could come together in this manner. A certain development on your part was absolutely necessary before such sessions between us could take place.