“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As I mentioned, the sixth inner sense involves something that can be likened to what you call the instincts, except that it is a property of the inner self. Consider a spider spinning a web. The web is a camouflage pattern that definitely exists on your plane. Here your simple spider is using his sixth sense, for these senses are the latent property of other living things, and not restricted to mankind.

What you have in the spider’s activity amounts to a demonstration of the sixth inner sense almost in its pure form. The spider has no intellect or outer ego, and his manipulations are the direct result of activities performed by pure and spontaneous use of the inner senses. They are unhampered and uncamouflaged to a great extent.

All of the inner senses are not utilized to the same degree on any plane. Many planes are given over to the training in the use of one or two of the most important inner senses. I liked the analogy of the spider and his web because it is such a simple and uncomplicated example of camouflage construction, divorced from intermediaries such as ego or tools.

Inherent, and I repeat inherent in the spider as in man, is the complete comprehension, or rather comprehension through direct experience, of the universe as a whole. In its particular existence the spider is not aware of all this knowledge, but it uses what is necessary of it to construct its web. It experiences directly. There is of course no “I” consciousness, but there is direct consciousness, nevertheless, of the most intimate kind.

Give the spider an ego and an intellect and you will see then how the picture would change. These would enable him to enlarge upon his scope of awareness and activity, but at the same time impediments would be placed so that the web construction would no longer appear either as direct as far as its source is concerned, nor as spontaneous.

You construct your own camouflage existence as the spider constructs his web, but you are not aware of the threads. You do not understand that they originate within yourself, although it is very simple to smile as the lowly spider weaves its web. The spider’s construction is severely limited to one plane, but this is not the case with your constructions, which may have reality on many planes at once, and in ways with which you are not familiar.

It should be obvious that although an idea is born in time, after its conception it is free from time in a way that a spider’s web can never be free from time. To the extent that a construction exists as camouflage, to that extent it is bound by and vulnerable to physical laws.

This sixth sense is one of the basic ones which makes use of the others possible. Mankind often confuses it with, and calls it, instinct. It is merely the innate knowledge which makes manipulation of energy from one form to another possible, and you use it constantly. The spider is more familiar with it in its pure form than you are. That is, than mankind is.