“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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 remains that psychologists or scientists cannot really speak of so-called ESP as either below normal or above normal as far as the species is concerned, just because Western man finds such difficulty in using it with any effectiveness. Other peoples manage to use it in a rather effective manner.

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.

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.

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.