“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.

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 designation does not include the entity as a whole, however. The personality does have access to the entity, but the personality does not contain the entity. In other words the whole self as it exists on your plane does not contain the entity, although communication between the entity and the whole self can and does take place by means of the inner senses.

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.

Again, at best you get something like a mirror image which must be deciphered. This is rather difficult to get across to you. However, data received by the inner senses will have its own discernible impact upon the personality receiving it, and this impact is as strong as any impact caused by camouflage stimuli.

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.

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.

Again, the impressions received by the inner senses are actually concrete in a way that you do not yet understand. This data also has physical effects upon the brain. In the same manner that impressions received from outside stimuli affect the brain, they make their impression upon it. They change the personality as any experience changes a personality. To insist upon evidence in terms of outside sensual data is as ridiculous a notion as to expect a camera to play music.

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.

At the same time, using the rather weak analogy of music as compared to inner data, you are refusing to use the phonograph. That is, you are refusing to use the very inner senses which are equipped to handle the data that you wish to capture.

It is true that as a whole you do not as yet understand the inner senses intellectually. The part of yourself which you deny understands the inner senses well. But this does you no good at this stage of the game and so you are in the peculiar position, once more, of trying to dissect the inner world with camouflage tools.

It is your refusal to accept the whole self that causes the difficulty. Once more: Data received by the inner senses is as vivid, and in fact more vivid, than any other data you will ever receive, and the ironic part of the whole matter is that you actually receive this inner data constantly. You utilize it constantly and yet consciously you will not accept its existence.

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.

There are so many gradations, and you have so many misconceptions, that I must tell you that at times I am appalled. Even my sense of humor withers.

If you will think (I hope) for simplicity’s sake of the whole self as it exists on your plane with its physical body, conscious ego and inner self as one field unit, which is also part of the larger or more complete entity as one field unit within another, then perhaps it will not be too much for you to imagine the connection, or one of the connections, between the entity field and the whole-self field, which is on your plane as being the inner senses—that is, the inner senses are one of the connectives between these two fields.

As these inner senses become more and more a part of your plane they take on more of the characteristics of your plane, and therefore more of the characteristics of the whole self on that plane.

They are more than prehistoric. They are in some respects evolutionary developments, being the end portions of the inner senses transformed to some degree, to permit manipulation of camouflage pattern. Before the conscious ego evolved, emotion served well as necessary stimuli to action in the camouflage environment. I am trying to put over the thought here in one way or another that as the inner senses come more and more within the field of the whole self on your plane, they take on its characteristics while yet retaining within themselves their own characteristics.

If you follow them backwards as it were, they will lead you to the inner senses as such, while being at the same time the same thing. I hope I have made this point clearly.

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.

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.

The outside senses are therefore fabricators of the most delightful sort. What will you ever do when you discover that everything your senses tell you is, in a most basic manner, false? Will you then stop operating in a physical world of physical objects? I doubt it very much.

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.

They are fields within fields. In our discussion of fifth dimension, I mentioned how the vitality of the universe changes in different planes while it actually makes up the planes at the same time. In this manner also the so-called whole self and entity are connected, in this case by many diverse patterns, the inner senses being composed of the same elements of which the entity itself is composed.

It is only the sense of duality, of which we have spoken, that makes death appear as such a dreadful thing. Once the personality realizes that even in life on your plane he is not always bound by physical data, and that even in physical life the most real portion of him is independent of physical matter, and in a personal way, then he will not fear death as a personal ending.