“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At that time old challenges had been met and old debts had been paid, to a large degree. I will not make this evening’s session too long because of last evening’s unscheduled one. However as you have probably supposed by now, change of sex and race is the usual as far as continuing existences on your plane are concerned.

Lack of this last factor can cause a personality to be reborn more times on your plane than would be necessary if only the role requirement operated. This requirement for fullest use of capabilities has nothing to do with opportunity in the social sense, although of course the particular social framework will have much to do with the particular development of certain abilities.

In the first place this vitality is self-generating and limitless, and we shall go into origins, reasons and so forth all in due time. Nevertheless as you do not deprive another of breath as you breathe, so you do not deprive another of the vitality of the universe simply by the act of using it yourself.

We have, I believe, used the analogy of air, comparing it to the vitality of the universe in one of our previous sessions. As air is dispelled from the lungs in various forms and used and reused without any loss of power, strength or quantity, so is the vitality of which we speak used in different manners. So does it enter as one thing many times, and so does it emerge as something different many times; and so does it change shape and content, and so does it show many faces and yet never disappears. And as air seems invisible so does this vitality seem invisible, and yet like air this vitality gives shape to every object that you see, and so does it form every camouflage. Without it all camouflage would vanish. And so the ability to use this vitality well is as necessary to life as is the necessity to use air for breathing.

(When I told her she had been pacing at a faster rate than ever before, she said it felt very effortless. She was not at all tired. This was the first time she had been aware of such a feeling. She resumed at 9:43.)

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.

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.”

You will notice I am sure that the brief breaks are getting briefer in duration; and yet I am letting you break more often but for shorter periods. This material, you will find, will be a basis for other material that will come, and I prefer to give it to you before we go any further into a study of time.

(Break at 10:32. During break Jane seemed to become aware of several things at once. She said she thought she’d been in a trance of some kind almost from the beginning of the session. She had no memory of giving the above monologue; she said it was as though she had “vanished.” I told her that of course she was with me all the time, pacing so fast that at times it was distracting. The material, she said, came through with no distortion at all. She felt as though she were a pure vehicle; she had no conscious thoughts about it, she was hardly aware of her environment at all. She had a vague memory of picking up a wineglass once. Actually I had watched her smoke a couple of cigarettes while dictating, pace back and forth, pause to look out the windows, etc. She did not feel tired, nor had her voice shown any changes.

Time is one of your most obvious camouflages, and the study of time will lead you in a fairly direct manner from the camouflaged physical self to the inner self, which you ignore. Even now your psychologists speak of the difference between physical time, by which you set your clocks, and psychological time.

Psychological time so-called belongs to the inner self, that is to the mind. It is however a connective, a portion of one of the inner senses, which we will call for convenience the second inner sense.

Outer physical time is a complete camouflage, unnecessary basically on your plane; but you have made it seem necessary because of your refusal to admit the inner self as part of your whole personality, and therefore you have not been able to utilize psychological time to its fullest advantage on your plane. Psychological time as I have said is a natural pathway, part of an inner sense, that was meant as an easy access from the inner to the outer world and back again. You do not use it as such.

This is one of the reasons why breathing seems automatic, and why dreaming seems to confound your physical camouflage idea of time. It is perfectly within your present capabilities to understand that time, to your dreaming self, is very much like time to your waking inner self. But you must first disconnect the physical concept of time and watches.

This concept is one of the easiest to explore, since as I have said your clock time is one of the most artificial of your camouflages. The time concept in dreams may seem far different than your conception of time in the waking state, when you have your eyes on a clock and are concerned with getting to some destination by, say, 12:15. But it is not so different from time in the waking state when you are sitting alone in a room with your thoughts, and with no particular need to get anywhere.

You will I am sure see the similarity now between this inner, alone sort of psychological time, experienced very often in waking hours, and the sense of time experienced in dreams. This is meant to show you but one more point of similarity between the waking and sleeping selves. In other words it is meant as another proof that they are indeed but one self, and that any divisions between them are artificial.

(We had company. I had just finished my first small glass of wine when a wave of “feeling” swept over me from foot to head. It was like a magnified tingling, or thrilling, suffusing the whole body, flooding up my legs into the abdominal and chest cavities; I was left feeling as though I might be lifted up and swept away. The first time the sensation was not as strong as the next two times. When it first swept over me, I wondered if the wine was responsible, though actually I had drunk very little.

(I waited quietly, and in a moment or two the sensation was gone. I was balanced on an arm of our davenport talking to our company. I had the odd feeling that the sensation was related both to the subject of conversation, and to some kind of message or communication I sensed or felt within; I believe that each time I experienced it, I was involved in talk about other people; relatives, children or perhaps parents.

(The next two sensations appeared somewhat later in the evening. The second one came perhaps after 11:30 PM, while we were sitting around the table eating. This sensation was so strong that I put down my sandwich and took off my glasses, because I literally did not know what to expect next. The wave of feeling washed over me very strongly. Although everyone about me was talking quite loudly, I had the weird sensation of voices within me, of mouths open or crying in soundless rhythm. I also felt, or sensed or perhaps glimpsed, a great chute or trough or pathway of some kind that reached down into me from above me, or at least from outside of me. I definitely felt apprehensive on this second occasion; I thought of some kind of attack, although there was no pain of any kind. The sensation in my chest was very strong. I believe, now that I look back, that this time I barely glimpsed the possibility that this might be an attempt at communication with me, from where I don’t know, or that perhaps it might be a premonitory warning. I believe I thought of my aging parents, but am not sure.

(The third time, after 12:30 AM, I was standing in the doorway to our kitchen talking to Jane when I had the sensation. This time it was not as strong. Even then, I was not quick-witted enough to capitalize upon it, perhaps by asking questions aloud. I was too involved, too swept up by this feeling, to be that objective on such short notice.

(While writing out this statement, I am reminded that I experienced the same sensation, one time in a milder form, about a year ago. It happened on my job at Artistic Card Co., at noon. I was alone in the art room, eating lunch at my desk, when the feeling swept over me from head to foot. There was no warning, no pain, but the surprise of it doubled me over my desk. I was of course frightened momentarily, thinking of some kind of attack, but it quickly passed and did not return. I happened to be alone at the time.

(I remember that I stood up and paced about for a few moments. Within a short time I forgot about it, until now. I recall that in a recent session Seth said that I had called for help. I had not left my full-time job at Artistic then, but was close to doing so, and at the time I had not been feeling well. Also, when I had the experience last Saturday, I was not feeling my best. As best I can remember, I did not tell Jane of the sensation I experienced at Artistic a year ago.