“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.

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.

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.