“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Tuesday morning Jane visited Miss Callahan in the front apartment, as Seth had suggested last session. Miss Callahan’s condition appeared to be remarkably good, compared to what it had been when last we visited her in the hospital some weeks ago. Jane said she did appear to have trouble with a faulty memory, however.

The cells and molecules, forming their psychic gestalt into a particular human physical structure, are separated from what you might call the outer environment, and yet they are also connected to the outer environment more than they are separated from it. It is the inner ego, and the inner vitality and the inner ego’s determination, along with the cooperation of all the cells that compose the physical body, that enables such a particular structure as the human body to exist as a separate construction, and to maintain the necessary sense of identity.

The physical structure alone is simply not divided from other structures in the manner which you perceive it to be through use of the outer senses. The outer senses are usually considered mainly as perceptive organs, enabling you to experience reality as it is. My dear friends, I have been waiting to tell you for some time that in a very true sense, the outer senses can be regarded as inhibitors.

It is as if you were sent into some strange and fascinating meadow, and given only the sense of sight. Imagine what you would miss: the odor of the fresh earth, the sounds, the touch of earth beneath your feet, of sun upon your back; using only the sense of smell, you would also be severely limited.

Because of the basic simplicity of the elements in your universe, and for other reasons already mentioned, there is no real boundary neither chemical, electrical or even psychic, between the self and what is usually considered not self.

This arbitrary limitation set upon the individual self is put upon it by its reliance upon the outer senses, as a method of perceiving reality. The outer senses are excellent tools of perception for limited circumstances. However, man has relied upon them so long, and with such cringing dependence, that now they threaten to hamper his own growth and development.

The expanding self, ideally, would reach out beyond the arbitrary boundaries it has placed upon itself. Again, there just is not any particular boundary between what is self and what is not self. There are gradations, and that is all. The skin is as much, if not more, a necessary connective as it is a boundary.

The self will truly utilize the atoms and molecules; the consciousness will travel by this method. The particular physical body will then be known for what it is: a cooperative psychic gestalt, a psychio-physical structure formed together by the inner ego, utilizing atoms and molecules that are in themselves living and conscious.

The point of difficulty is your panicky and protective huddling within the core of a limited self, and your fear to set aside the endless doors between self and what seems to be not self, that you yourself have erected.

—even when your own technological advancements prove beyond doubt that in many cases the evidence of your own outer senses is wrong, and does not represent reality, but represents an arbitrary pattern forced upon reality. Through the outer senses you must always see reality in arbitrary, really unchanging terms; and reality can simply not be held within such boundaries.

There is a temporary and initial, barely perceivable enlargement, a deep pulsing in the manner of a beating forth of cells and molecules—actually a sort of pulsation resulting in a minute but definite enlargement of tissue. You experience this in slow motion. Completed, the process would represent what would appear to be a propulsion of consciousness or self from the tissues.