“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You will, as I have said before, benefit through the quiet exercise of your inner senses. This cannot be stressed too strongly. Such use of the inner senses will also be of benefit to both of you in these sessions, and will add dimension to them in a manner with which you are as yet unfamiliar.

Now, about the inner senses. They fit together in a much more organized fashion than the outer senses do, and in some cases they tend to overlap. To describe them separately is difficult at best, their functions are so intertwined; and the distinctions between them are oftentimes extremely subtle. Too subtle in a few cases to be appreciated by you.

Operating more or less normally, they work as a whole. You will experience them separately, in many cases simply because of your own ineptitude. This should not be too hard to understand since your own outer senses are often blocked so that you are not aware of any given stimulus at any given time. That is, you may hear sounds and consciously ignore them.

I want to go into the inner senses further but suggest that you take your first break.

As far as the inner senses are concerned, they merge smoothly, one into the other, operating as a unit in what I will call pure unhampered circumstances. They work that way for me, for example, yet I must attempt to list them separately for you.

For example as I have said, the fourth or conceptual sense ignores what you call past, present and future, and so can appreciate a concept in its entirety, can actually experience the concept in much the same manner that you might work out an idea through a drama, if you follow me.

Only in this case the dramatization provides its own actors. I am going to leave further discussion of this sense until some later session, when after additional material you will be able to understand it more thoroughly. And again remember that these senses, these inner senses, operate as a whole, and that at least to some degree the divisions between them are somewhat arbitrary on my part, and are made for the sake of simplicity.

The fifth inner sense carries us further along in this direction, and involves what I will call cognition of the knowledgeable essence. This sense differs from the fourth inner sense in that it does not involve the cognition of a concept.

It is similar to the fourth sense in that it is free of course from the arbitrary past, present and future, and it is also similar in that it involves an intimate becoming, or a transformation of self into something else.

In this case it would involve living tissue. The analogy is difficult on your terms. With your outer senses now, you attempt to understand a relative or a friend. Use of this fifth inner sense, were it available to you, and in its fuller sense -fortunately it is not—would enable you to enter into your friend.

This inner sense is not only an important one but is immensely beneficial, and is not misused in any way by those able to use it. Very simply, these senses do not function until they can be handled correctly. This sense in no way involves invasion. It does not imply that one entity can control another. It merely involves direct, instantaneous cognition of the essence of living tissue.

This fifth sense, then, would enable you some freedom to cross this living tissue boundary into other living territory. Do not think of this living tissue necessarily as flesh, since those who are capable of using this sense fully are not on your plane to begin with.

Now this sense, like all other inner senses, is being used by the inner self-conscious ego, but the outer ego is not permitted awareness along these lines. A minimum amount of information from these inner senses is given to the outer ego after it is sifted through the subconscious. But only a minimum amount.

Without any use of this fifth inner sense no man would even come close to understanding another. This is an extremely important point, and perhaps your phrase “to put yourself in someone else’s place,” most clearly approximates this sense.

Direct experience in these inner senses will give you a much clearer picture of them than any words, even mine, can do. You understand however that any direct experience will be of very low power. I don’t want to blast you off your feet.

I am mentioning this material in the same session with the fifth inner sense so that you will finally understand that use of the fifth inner sense is not actually as strange as you may have thought it to be.

Now again, understand that I am breaking down an extremely complex concept into piecemeal data. There are again extremely subtle differences at times between these inner senses, although at either end of the scale there is great distinction.

To complete our skeleton outline, and we will go much more deeply into all of the inner senses, I will give you some data on the sixth inner sense, which actually involves a knowledge or ability used by some of the others.

As far as inner senses go, it is an extremely basic and rudimentary sense, containing within it the possibility of other inner senses. Although it is one of the most necessary senses, I could not give it to you first since you would not have understood it.

This sixth inner sense is concerned with the entity’s innate working knowledge of the basic vitality of the universe, without which no manipulation of vitality stuff would be possible. As, for example, you could not stand up straight in your physical universe without first having among other things an innate sense of balance.

This sixth sense is too important to skim over, and yet I wanted to mention it this evening because it fits in with our discussion. Without this sixth sense, and without its constant use by the inner self-conscious ego, you could not even construct the physical camouflage universe of your own plane. This sense, again, is used constantly beneath the outer ego’s awareness, and forms the basis for camouflage constructions on every plane.

The material I am giving you here is very fragmentary. However, I want the outline to go along, and I will always continue to fill in. This sixth inner sense is so important that this material should be read thoroughly, as it will end up as one of the basic parts of our material, from which many other important discussions will follow.

(At 8:45 I walked into the living room to call Jane. She lay quietly on the couch, eyes closed, but in a few minutes told me she was awake. She also told me she had been visited by a most strange sensation; and from her description of it I felt sure it must be an exploration of the inner senses, similar to the one I experience occasionally, which Seth has called the feeling of sound. I thought Jane’s description most remarkable.