“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

His education, his everyday pattern of existence, his cultural values, tend to imprison him so that he can only view other societies through the murky haze of his own misconceptions. If he considers a native in Africa, for example, as a superstitious rather imbecilic, almost prehistoric creature from the past, then he will learn nothing of that man’s ability. He will ridicule any such evidence of so-called ESP on the native’s part as further proof of the African’s childlike mind.

The fact is that when you insist upon evidence through the outside, regularly accepted senses, that you almost automatically turn off the inner sense apparatus. This is not necessary. Man to a large degree has set up this habit reaction. It is not a natural habit reaction. You must take the inner data at its face value, and this is what you will not do. Once you take this first step of spontaneity, you will actually receive evidence that even your conscious mind will be forced to accept. But the first step of such willingness must be made.

It is your refusal to accept the whole self that causes the difficulty. Once more: Data received by the inner senses is as vivid, and in fact more vivid, than any other data you will ever receive, and the ironic part of the whole matter is that you actually receive this inner data constantly. You utilize it constantly and yet consciously you will not accept its existence.

The very fact that you breathe and dream and perform countless other activities without any aid from the conscious ego should of itself convince even the most stubborn scientific skull that more is involved than science is willing to admit. The idea of the subconscious mind is merely a grudging, hedging, partial admission that man is more than the conscious ego, more than the sum of his parts, and more than a mechanism.

The emotions belong to the personality, that is to the present personality, and are strongly connected both to the conscious ego and to the inner self, which is so often ignored. This is the rather difficult part for me to explain, I’m afraid. I’m not sure how to go about making this clear.

If you will think (I hope) for simplicity’s sake of the whole self as it exists on your plane with its physical body, conscious ego and inner self as one field unit, which is also part of the larger or more complete entity as one field unit within another, then perhaps it will not be too much for you to imagine the connection, or one of the connections, between the entity field and the whole-self field, which is on your plane as being the inner senses—that is, the inner senses are one of the connectives between these two fields.

They are more than prehistoric. They are in some respects evolutionary developments, being the end portions of the inner senses transformed to some degree, to permit manipulation of camouflage pattern. Before the conscious ego evolved, emotion served well as necessary stimuli to action in the camouflage environment. I am trying to put over the thought here in one way or another that as the inner senses come more and more within the field of the whole self on your plane, they take on its characteristics while yet retaining within themselves their own characteristics.

What you call racial memory exists as inner emotional memory experience. The line between inner and outer does not exist in actuality any more than a line exists between consciousness and unconsciousness. What you call the subconscious is merely an ill-defined meeting place of inner and outer experience; and I am forced to use these terms inner and outer only because of your misconception of duality.

What you are pleased to call the subconscious represents merely the part of the inner senses, or of the inner self, that even your society can no longer ignore. And this is indeed only the surface. Here you find of course the repository for personal memories, and not of personal egobound conscious memories either, but also of psychological experiences that the ego itself prefers to forget.

If you closed your mind and refused to see a whole tree, nothing would convince you that the part you did not see existed. If such a tree fell upon you, you might wonder at its weight. However, you would find some explanation, rather than the right one. If some few individuals began to question the shape of trees, and some therefore began to see whole trees, you would undoubtedly call them mad, be completely unbothered, and feel yourselves justified.

The tree itself in some ways is wiser than man. We have spoken of the inner consciousness of a tree before. But the tree does not—and you’ll have to take my word for this—consider itself in divisions. A tree does not divide itself up into a self that grows leaves and roots, and into a self that is automatically moved by the wind through its branches.