“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.