“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt has been complaining with loud inner wails because he has been sleeping later in the mornings, and hasn’t put in his full work time this week. And of course I am to blame. I am most certainly not to blame. I certainly will not be the family whipping boy. It is true that I have disrupted your schedule to some degree, but not after all in any great manner. How could you be spending the same amount of time any more profitably? The truth is, that the lazy ego finds excuses where it may.

Nor is there anything wrong in inventiveness itself. Manipulation of camouflage patterns is to be expected, and furthermore is desirable. However, many native societies appreciate the fact of camouflage patterns, and retain the ability to separate the whole self from camouflage.

When I speak of the whole self I am of course referring to the personality as it exists in its entirety, having at its command use of both the inner and outer senses. That is, I speak of the doer, the mover, the breather and the dreamer as all belonging to one whole self.

This designation does not include the entity as a whole, however. The personality does have access to the entity, but the personality does not contain the entity. In other words the whole self as it exists on your plane does not contain the entity, although communication between the entity and the whole self can and does take place by means of the inner senses.

The trouble is in ESP investigations, that you are using the wrong tools again. You are taking this dual self for granted again. Until you realize that there is one self, and not one self who does and manipulates and another self who breathes and dreams, you will get nowhere quickly. Investigations carried on according to what is considered scientific precepts are doomed in a large measure to slow-motion tactics at best, and to complete failure at worst.

This does not mean that evidence cannot be found, and overwhelming evidence, for the existence of the inner senses. It does mean that spontaneity must be allowed for. It is extremely difficult to relate data received by the inner senses into data that will be picked up by the outer senses.

Again, at best you get something like a mirror image which must be deciphered. This is rather difficult to get across to you. However, data received by the inner senses will have its own discernible impact upon the personality receiving it, and this impact is as strong as any impact caused by camouflage stimuli.

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.

If you once allow yourself to freely receive inner data in a spontaneous noncritical manner, you will see that this data is as legitimate, valid and varied, and as powerful as any outside stimuli. But to insist upon translating this data into channels that can first be picked up by the outer senses, and then expecting undistorted strong data, is asking the impossible.

Again, the impressions received by the inner senses are actually concrete in a way that you do not yet understand. This data also has physical effects upon the brain. In the same manner that impressions received from outside stimuli affect the brain, they make their impression upon it. They change the personality as any experience changes a personality. To insist upon evidence in terms of outside sensual data is as ridiculous a notion as to expect a camera to play music.

At the same time, using the rather weak analogy of music as compared to inner data, you are refusing to use the phonograph. That is, you are refusing to use the very inner senses which are equipped to handle the data that you wish to capture.

It is true that as a whole you do not as yet understand the inner senses intellectually. The part of yourself which you deny understands the inner senses well. But this does you no good at this stage of the game and so you are in the peculiar position, once more, of trying to dissect the inner world with camouflage tools.

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.

A death in a family, for example, is a physical occurrence. Various members of the family will react differently, as you know. The psychological experience will be intensely diversified, personal, unpredictable as far as each family member is concerned. You cannot observe this actual psychological experience with the outer senses. Even you yourself cannot see, smell, touch that inner experience. You cannot hold it in both hands and look it over. You cannot observe it in any objective manner, as you can observe a pencil on a table, yet it would be foolish to say that this psychological experience did not exist. It is too vivid to ignore, and oftentimes the personality is almost divorced from action because of this experience that is psychological, that cannot be observed with instruments, or even by the person involved.

The emotions come closer than anything else to the vividness of inner data. There are of course more differences than similarities. However because of the intense quality of emotional experience this is still a good comparison. With the emotions however, there is in many cases a stimulus to action in the outside camouflage pattern.

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.

As these inner senses become more and more a part of your plane they take on more of the characteristics of your plane, and therefore more of the characteristics of the whole self on that plane.

The emotions, while connected to the ego strongly, nevertheless also belong to what we have been pleased to call the subconscious. But because they are so intertwined with the inner life they are also common to both the ego and the so-called subconscious.

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.

If you follow them backwards as it were, they will lead you to the inner senses as such, while being at the same time the same thing. I hope I have made this point clearly.

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.

The fields intermingle. I wanted to make another point, which was that data received by the inner senses is as intense and vivid, and often more so, than any psychological experience, and as I mentioned, you cannot examine a psychological experience in a laboratory either. But the worst of fools would not deny psychological experience for this reason.

On the other hand your inner senses are much more reliable. Your inner data is much more reliable. Your psychological experience is valid, whether chairs are solid or not. And the inner data and the inner self which you deny is a lot more permanent, my dear Joseph, and I am speaking to you as proof.

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.

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.

This dual self, in fact, does not exist anywhere else as far as I know. We will go into some of the reasons for this duality again later. Tonight’s discussion is important because for the first time I have really tried to show you how the inner and outer planes or fields are connected.

They are fields within fields. In our discussion of fifth dimension, I mentioned how the vitality of the universe changes in different planes while it actually makes up the planes at the same time. In this manner also the so-called whole self and entity are connected, in this case by many diverse patterns, the inner senses being composed of the same elements of which the entity itself is composed.

The present personality cannot travel to the complete entity, again because of these very real laws; that is, while caught in or under the influence of the field of your plane, the personality cannot travel to the entity. The personality can and should be aware of the whole self of which it is a part, and that part of the whole self which the ego ignores, is the one part which can enter into the field influence of the entity, though it cannot travel to the entity itself.

Death is the personality’s release from the physical plane, or we will use the term “the physical field,” and that is all. To the ego this is a frightening future in prospect. To the ego, even sleep seems a slap in the face. Recognition in physical life of the whole self would do much to negate this death fear, since there are rather pleasant psychological experiences which are akin to the experience of death, and which would prepare the personality for this eventuality.