“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(By 8:50 Jane said, “I sort of feel Seth around, but I don’t know what he’s going to talk about.” She also said she did not feel quite as nervous. At 8:58 she had received Seth’s greeting; but she held him off until 9 PM.

(“What was the sensation I felt when the tree fell?”)

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.

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.

Centuries after the original cry. That is, the strength of the inner sensual impact was as weakened and diluted as it would have been if what you heard was a cry through the outer ear that came originally from centuries already gone by.

Through experience in the various levels of existence the inner ego and the outer ego come closer and closer together. The subconscious eventually disappears, as it is no longer needed as a necessary buffer zone. At your stage of development the inner ego is by far the most self-conscious part of the whole self, and has the greatest ability for perception and organization. It alone is capable of experiencing inner and basic reality directly and immediately. It alone can cope with the tumultuous nature of such direct reality experience.

In the various levels of existence the inner and outer egos begin to merge. Gradually direct experience of inner reality is spoon-fed by the inner ego through the mouth of the subconscious to the outer ego. The division between the inner and outer egos is necessary for other reasons than the nature of direct experience itself. That is, the outer ego is shielded from direct experience of reality because it could not take the impact of such experience. But this is not the only reason.

The subconscious—to finish what I began—the subconscious cushions the outer ego really against the shock of true reality. If sometimes it seems to you that you are living in a dream world, in many respects you are. You are not strong enough yet to bear the brunt of basic reality, and you construct complicated dream worlds in order to find shelter from what would appear to you as savage, uncontrolled and undisciplined chaos.

(For the next four paragraphs, I experienced many instances of what I thought might be telepathy between Jane and me. I did not receive whole sentences from her, but often would seem to pick out the exact words of a phrase just before she gave voice to them.)

Basic reality is not uncontrolled, savage, undisciplined or chaotic, but if you were suddenly confronted with it at your present state of development you would be like a straw in a hurricane. But because of your weakness, the various levels of existence merely prepare you and equip you for the experience of true reality, of which you have but a glimmering.

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.

As the intense experience of great joy or pain often blots out everything else, so would the direct experience of reality blot out, only completely, the outer ego who experienced it directly. At your level the sieve of the subconscious is a necessity and that is one of the main reasons why Ruburt dissociates during our sessions, even though his experience of inner reality is received secondhanded, so to speak, through me.

My Piggly Wigglies, you have received some excellent material this evening, if I do say so myself. And what of your trip to your brother’s?