“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Studies will show that this duality is not a natural state of man, since even today many so-called primitive societies do not experience this duality to anything like the degree with which it affects more civilized communities. This alone should be proof that the condition is not a prerequisite for the species as such. Instead, and to the contrary, this sense of duality besieges man as he becomes more inventive in a purely mechanical fashion.

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.

I am not going to go into this particular matter to any great degree. There is certainly much to be said for Western man. However it is usually said by others, very eloquently, and nothing is said about the abilities of less civilized soto-speak societies.

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 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.

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 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.