“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane has begun her psychological time experiments, though she is still not on a regular day-to-day basis. Her experiment mentioned by Seth at the opening of the session was not a spectacular one by any means. It involved what Jane calls merely her “good state”. In more exceptional cases this escalates into her version of ecstasy.

(Yesterday, deliberately, I mentioned to Jane that Seth had not given us any more material on the inner senses for many sessions. What I meant of course was that he had not catalogued the later material under the various inner senses, as he had originally designated them. I felt that he would eventually do so. Checking the various categories of material against the original list of the inner senses, it was usually easy to see where the two fit together.

In other species within your field, however, some of these various methods have been chosen and utilized. Many animals for example literally see through the sense of smell. They quite literally perceive what you would call the sight of another animal, through the use of the sense of smell.

Now for a moment we will return to our material on action, and you may perhaps see why this fits in so well here. No action is identical to any other action. An action is never entirely dissipated, though it may pass beyond its particular field of origin. This transference, incidentally, from one system to another, necessarily changes the action itself; but for simplicity’s sake we may say that an action has its reality within many systems simultaneously.

The sight of our imaginary automobile, therefore, is perceived by you as a visual stimulus, because you are conditioned to perceiving it in such a fashion. But it is also possible to perceive our automobile in entirely different fashions within different realities, and from various perspectives.

It is even possible for the physical individual to train himself to change the nature of his own perception of such objects. It is not a question of the car having certain properties, being real to one perceptive view and therefore necessarily unreal to another. To a very large degree, the portion of any reality that you can perceive is determined largely not by the given, so-called real object itself, but from the perspective, and because of, the senses with which you perceive it.

Again, in this distortion we see the creation, however minute, of a new reality. The universe is cohesive, but it is also more various than you know even now. The nature of our object, our automobile for example, is indeed largely determined by those who perceive it, for it is different things in reality, and not one thing. Electrically it has an identity, and would be perceived as an entirely different phenomena from within an electrical system, where there would be no perceptors of physical data.

These various conceptions of the automobile would also apply of course to the perception of any physical beings within the car; that is, their reality would also be perceived differently, according to the perspective systems which viewed them.

You must indeed for practical reasons pretend as if the automobile had no reality except the reality with which you are familiar, but this is not the case. I mentioned feeling sound because this is a capability that lies latent within your own physical system, but this same sort of a juggling of perspective data is what happens, generally speaking, when inhabitants of a different system perceive realities that also have an existence within your own system.

It is really a building up of idea into a whole pattern that can be perceived by the camouflage senses. Any reality therefore will be variously perceived, and the nature of the reality will necessarily be distorted in the very attempt to perceive it. Here again we have our creative tension, whereby a new reality is formed as a result of the distortion itself. Within your system colors may be perceived as sound. Their connections with human moods is only too apparent.

Emotions may even cause a color reaction. Any reality, regardless of which system it originates within, will appear to some degree within all systems. Even within your own system, though perhaps on a subconscious level, all emotions have a reality in color. They have, as you know, a chemical reaction which is sniffed by other animals.

I am not going to hold a very long session this evening. Rather than give you fairly frequent short vacations, I may at times close a session early. We still come out ahead in terms of time. We are heading here indeed, slowly but surely, toward a thorough discussion of the inner senses, which could not be given until you had a good background in the nature of action itself. For you should be able to see now that the inner senses allow a more faithful perception of basic reality than the outer senses could ever give.

Reality is indeed not necessarily that which is constant within the various appearances of reality through all systems, as it is the perception of the whole picture of reality, or the sum of all reality as seen within the various systems. This involves quite a complicated point, and implies a complicated position; for true reality would not be completely either the reality of an automobile, say, as it appears within the physical system, or as it appears within the electrical system. It would not be that which appears identical to the two systems, but it would be indeed the sum of the realities of all systems, as applied to our weary automobile.

The inner senses, by being free of camouflage information, are more or less (in quotes) “pure” perceptors, perceiving with but little prejudice of many realities while being imprisoned by none.

Any action, any reality, irregardless, constantly and instantaneously changes. There are no exceptions to this rule. Any appearance of permanence is illusion.