“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At about 6:30 p.m. Jane was reading a magazine article, and came across the word specious. She found herself reading the word as spacious; then the phrase “spacious present” came to mind. She did not feel Seth about, yet thought the phrase significant for some reason.

I was about your establishment earlier, and Ruburt was right. There was a purpose in his misreading. Actually, subconsciously he picked up my thoughts on this occasion. He picked them up a few minutes earlier but his mind waited for a suitable occasion to transpose the word spacious in connection with the present. The spacious present is an excellent term. In actuality there is only a spacious present, so spacious that it cannot be explored all at once in your terms, hence your arbitrary division of it into larger rooms of past, present and future.

Again, there is only the spacious present. You are in the spacious present now. You were in the spacious present in your yesterday and you still will not have traveled through it in your tomorrow, or in eons of tomorrows.

In your terms, the rate at which you discover the facets and realities of the spacious present becomes your camouflage time. On your plane there must be physical manipulation. This gives you also the illusion of past and future, and to you it appears that the present is a fleeting, almost ashen illusion in itself, beyond any true remembrance and beyond the reach of any but nostalgic recall. This is also caused by your camouflage system in which physical materializations appear and grow, mature and disappear.

In the spacious present as it exists in actuality beyond shadow, all things that have existed still exist, and all things that shall exist in your tomorrow already do exist. You on your plane cannot experience such reality except in a very limited manner, and you cannot experience such reality spontaneously, and spontaneity is the quality of the spacious present. To you with your ideas of camouflage time this material may sound strange and unbelievable.

As I have said that the walls of your house do not actually exist as such, so the divisions that you have placed within the spacious present do not exist. But as the walls of your house are experienced by your outer senses, and serve to protect you against other camouflage materializations, even those of wind and rain and cold, so do the walls of past, present and future, erected by you as a different kind of camouflage pattern, protect you from inner forces and realities with which you are not as yet equipped to deal.

The idea of past, present and future is a necessary one on your plane, but this certainly does not mean that time exists in the manner which you suppose. You are obsessed with the theory of beginning and end, because in your situation your camouflage constructions seem to have a beginning and an end.

There is no cause and effect in the terms in which you understand the words. Nor is there a succession of moments that follow one after the other; and without a succession of moments following one after the other you can see that the idea of cause and effect becomes meaningless. An action of the present in your terms cannot be based or caused by an action in the past, and neither action can be the cause of a future action in a basic reality where neither past nor future exist.

There can be order without a succession of moments. There can be order, believe it or not, without your cause and effect. There can be order, and there is order, in spontaneity, and in the simultaneous existence of the spacious present.

Order is one of the most basic attributes of all reality, and order is an inherent attribute in all things. There is no beginning and no end; only your camouflage idea structures give this illusion. All planes of existence have their being in the spacious present, and all fragment dramas are acted at the same time.

Some of this material will take some getting used to but I wanted to give it to you now; and perhaps you will see how important the use of psychological time can be to you. It comes very close to allowing you the freedom of the spacious present. There is more I will say later along these lines, but your experience with psychological time will to some degree help you to see through the walls of past and future. I realize you will find the statement, there is no beginning or end, almost incomprehensible, because of your own situation on your own plane, and yet this has been known for centuries; and your own Einstein’s theories will help to give the idea scientific respectability.

The discovery of the existence of the fifth dimension will of course lead your aggressive fellows into the realization that other intelligence can exist outside of your particular camouflage universe. And the quantitative distance on your own particular horizontal plane actually amounts to a qualitative difference, in that the theories of universal laws as presently conceived simply will not hold.