“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We had but a 5-inch reel, and since the hypnosis material was also on this reel we didn’t think we could record the whole Seth session, even with 4-track technique. But Jane set up the recorder, placed the mike on a coffee table near the center of the room, and ran a few feet of tape to make sure her voice was picked up from any part of the room. She then rewound the tape, recorded her name, the time and the date, and switched the set off. This was done by 8:45.

I know quite well that your toy is recording. This bothers me in no way whatsoever. Ruburt is aware of the droning of the machine but this will pass. And congratulations, my dear friends, on our 25th anniversary. You will be much older by the time I get through with you.

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.

If you use psychological time in the manner which I described, you will find that I have given you a time gift, in that you will receive great refreshment and relaxation in a short period of clock time. And your need for sleep will be minimized. This involves some training on your part, but is relatively easy and should come without too much difficulty.

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.

Much investigation along the lines of so-called ESP is being carried on in the Western world. The fact is that Western man has not only cut himself off from half of his own ability, and half of his own knowledge because of his insistence upon an artificial dual nature, but he has also cut himself off from the very primitive societies from which he could learn very much about these abilities, which he himself refuses to admit.

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.

Music exists and can be played on a phonograph. Sights can be captured by camera. But you do not expect music to come from a camera. You do not expect a phonograph to take pictures, yet while you are listening to music from a phonograph this does not mean, even to you, that cameras do not record sight. You are expecting the outer senses to do something they are not capable of doing, of receiving or performing in a way that is alien to them. You are expecting them to act like a camera that can pick up music, and because the camera does not pick up music you are saying that music does not exist.

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.

The point I wanted to make earlier was that evidence of what you call ESP will be arrived at. But as you receive evidence of sound through the ears and do not ordinarily expect to see through your ears, so the evidence must come through the correct channels. One of your main difficulties is that you will not accept as evidence anything which is not perceivable in one manner or another through the outer senses. That is, you will not consider an experience as valid unless it can be demonstrated as physical camouflage reality.

Almost everyone is familiar with something else, however, and that is the psychological experience which may have no observable physical effect, and yet can change a personality to a large degree. Now the change in the personality may have secondary physical effects. The personality may act in certain ways in the physical world as a result of a psychological experience. But these physical effects are secondary to the experience, and the experience of itself makes no physical effect upon the material world. Any such effects are made after the experience by the personality involved.

Now physical effects may follow, such as weeping, mourning and so forth, but these effects are secondary. The experience itself does not shed tears, though the receiver of the experience may shed tears. I am trying to show you here that many experiences in everyday life, which you know by their vividness to be valid, cannot be perceived by the outer senses. And yet you are completely familiar with them.

Your scientists with their instruments have succeeded in inducing the emotions of fear, sorrow, and so forth in some operations, but the experience itself remains subjective and psychological. Some physical effects, and again even these are secondary effects, may be observed as far as the emotions are concerned, in that pulses may quicken, certain chemicals and hormones may quicken their activity.

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.

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.

The term ESP in itself is a result of this artificial duality, maintaining as it does that anything not perceived through the outer senses is therefore extra and tacked on, so to speak. But this, dear friends, will pass. In the first place, your most pragmatic scientist is even now forced to admit, as even Ruburt knows, that solid objects are not solid; and the interesting sidelight of this fact must be that your faithful, tried and true, so-called dependable outer senses are in reality lovely liars, since the eyes see a chair as solid while the chair is not solid at all.

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.

This subconscious is another link or connective between the two fields of which we have spoken, and again, as it enters your plane it takes on the characteristics of your plane. That is why you find personal memories at the outermost portion, but the subconscious also reaches to the entity itself.

But if some of these individuals who saw whole trees began eating the fruits of the other side of the trees, you would be up in arms. You would call the fruits, I am sure, extra benefits or extrasensory perceptions. This is just a little story of my own, though I am glad to see a smile on Joseph.

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.

(Along in here the recorder abruptly ran out of tape. The noise of the flapping end was startling. But the machine switched itself off, and Jane did not interrupt her dictation.)