“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

On the other hand your inner senses are much more reliable. Your inner data is much more reliable. Your psychological experience is valid, whether chairs are solid or not. And the inner data and the inner self which you deny is a lot more permanent, my dear Joseph, and I am speaking to you as proof.

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.

Death is the personality’s release from the physical plane, or we will use the term “the physical field,” and that is all. To the ego this is a frightening future in prospect. To the ego, even sleep seems a slap in the face. Recognition in physical life of the whole self would do much to negate this death fear, since there are rather pleasant psychological experiences which are akin to the experience of death, and which would prepare the personality for this eventuality.