“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I am sorry that your tree has vanished, yet we all know that the tree has not really vanished. And I hope that you will use your inner senses to create the tree in your mind for the painting that you have begun. Now it will be a better tree in the painting, for you will be able to create the essence of the tree.

The sensation represented the twang of the inner senses as they registered the basic tree value. Had you had the opportunity to do more work with psychological time you would have been able to attain greater perception than you did. You will find that your painting will not suffer. Do you have any more questions in particular?

(“Well, we’d like to get more information on the inner senses.”)

Now basically, consciousness itself is a type of barrier, and anything that has consciousness experiences time to some degree. This degree may be so slight that to you it would not seem to exist at all. Self-consciousness presents a larger barrier, therefore the sense of time is greater. Psychological time is the lowest common denominator, so to speak, from your viewpoint. That is, many of the barriers disappear. Psychological time represents on your plane the closest you can come to the experience of timelessness as far as your physical laws are concerned.

You do experience time, but not time as it is bound by your camouflage patterns. As I have mentioned you can in a dream or daydream or through conscious use of psychological time experience many hours in a few clock minutes. This experience comes very close to the third inner sense. If you will remember again our imaginary experience through the inner senses as we looked down at the street, you will remember that I spoke of sensing not only the present essence of the living consciousnesses within a certain scope, but I also mentioned sensing their past and futures.

This sensing would have been done by the third inner sense, in conjunction of course with other senses, and this perception of past, present and future would not take any clock time, at least not theoretically. You I doubt will ever have such an experience completely. There will always be some clock time involved for you.

Since our imagined experience would depend upon all of the inner senses working together in a complex, near-perfect manner, that I doubt you could achieve at this stage. This experiencing of past, present and future would seem to be unwilled, almost automatic. If you were to have it or one like it, it would seem as if a door suddenly for no reason opened and then just as abruptly closed. This would not be the case however.

The inner ego or the inner self-conscious self directs such experiences and uses the inner senses in much the same way that you use the outer senses, except that the inner ego knows all of the mechanics involved in the use of the inner senses, and you know little of the mechanics involved with the outer senses.

A point I wanted to add, Joseph. What you actually felt when the tree fell was the pain of the tree, in much muted form. The tree while dead still had consciousness. As a rule you will usually have such experiences to begin with through one inner sense. You are not adept enough yet to recognize inner data from more than one direction at a time.

You may have experiences through all of the inner senses but not at once. This is a great simplification. What I should perhaps add for the sake of clearness is that you will not as a rule be aware of data that comes to you through more than one sense, inner sense, at a time.

The fact is that the whole self is constantly experiencing data from all of the inner senses. The inner ego is of course aware of this. The subconscious is sometimes aware of this, and the outer ego is aware of very little. I have explained the reasons for this in past sessions. The outer ego must concentrate much of its energy toward survival in and manipulation of the outer camouflage world. This world has already been created by the inner self, and its continuing existence is determined by the constant vigilance of the inner self.

Only when a certain level of confidence is reached can the outer ego afford to become familiar with these inner workings, at least on your plane. Otherwise you would falter. As a rule, even though the whole self is capable of organizing the data from all of the inner senses, the subconscious can rarely receive such communications full blast; and the outer ego, concerned as it is with camouflage pattern, and really born to deal with camouflage pattern, simply could not stand the shock of realization that a complete set of inner senses would bring.

This sort of experience will always be shielded from the outer ego of necessity. Even a watered-down version of a direct inner experience is a shock to the outer ego on your plane, since the ego imagines itself and its own perceptions to be supreme. You have no idea, even with what training you have, of how shattering such a complete experience would be to the outer ego, so we will take one inner-sense experience at a time.

Had you experienced the pain of the tree as directly and as immediately as you would sense another person’s pain through the ordinary senses you could not have stood it. It would be like the tearing away of your own limbs. Nor is this in any sense a distortion or an exaggeration.

Full use of the inner senses is not even for me yet. There is still a long way for me to go. We progress along these lines according to our capabilities and our own strengths. The conscious ego also develops in a strange manner through all this, as I will now attempt to explain.

To the extent that you are able to allow yourselves to be aware of data received by the inner senses, you are preparing yourself and are that far ahead. You remember, Joseph, the rather frightening sensation you felt during one instance of your use of one inner sense, when you translated inner data into the almost nightmare picture of open mouths that could not scream. This is but a minute instance.

I do not mean to mislead you. Basic reality is not by nature terrifying. It is however vibrant and direct to the extreme, and you must be prepared before you experience such an ultrasonic action. A direct experience of reality involves complete use of all the inner senses to an integrated cognizance field. A very weak analogy can be found if you imagine at one time hearing the most exciting and moving music imaginable, while simultaneously smelling the strongest but not necessarily unpleasant odor, viewing the most emotionally-charged scene while feeling intense and vivid bodily sensations. In normal life you even turn down outer-sense stimuli for the sake of simplicity, and to enable you to focus upon those stimuli close at hand.

Ruburt is letting me through well this evening and I find my feelings for both of you most affectionate. This material, you will find, will begin and only begin to fill in the outline on the inner senses. We will still take many sessions before you attain any real understanding of these matters, and my dear biggy-boos, I hope to add to our lectures with exercises in the experience of the various inner senses as we go along.

Such exercises as a rule will not take up time during sessions however, but will appear at other occasions, consume hardly any clock time at all, and seem spontaneous. As preparation I suggest that your reread the material given so far on the inner senses, the first, second and third. We will go into the other inner senses at future sessions.

I do not want to go into other inner sense material this evening as it is too late to begin on the fourth inner sense. Try and use psychological time as I have told you. This is extremely valuable, for it is the channel through which all other inner data must come at your particular stage.