“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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?

I will not bother giving you much review on this subject. There is however much still to be said along these lines. You will recall our imaginary experience at the window. Ruburt read tonight my statement that without barriers there would be no time.

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.

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 music is more important to Ruburt than either of you know. If the man comes let him in. I will be with you but quiet, and I would be curious in any case. Perhaps I will tell you about your TV man. So be quiet, kind hearts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You would find it difficult to attend to or be aware of regular outer stimuli while you dealt with the ordinary function of daily life. Is it then any wonder that the outer ego leaves the inner data to the safekeeping of the inner ego? You are truly babes in the woods, having enough trouble getting along in your own universe. And do not get your feelings hurt, I am not referring to either of you in particular, as you should know by now.

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.

(Break at 11:01. Jane was dissociated as usual. We talked about Jane asking Bill Macdonnel to be a witness to next Wednesday’s session. Bill had agreed. We also wondered whether Seth would say anything about our TV repairman. Resume at 11:08.)

The back room is the best for sleeping. However it is also the best for your working purposes, Joseph. The small room will do as a sleeping room, but the head of the bed should be at the north. And in the use of psychological time exercises you would do well if your head was at the north.

On a further rather insignificant note, a doorway arrangement would be somewhat beneficial at your kitchen, if this is practical, and this is undistorted. Otherwise you have maximum benefit from your present living quarters.