“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your attentions are indeed focused elsewhere. You are in a trance as well as Ruburt is in a trance state now. This is far from unusual. I use you, dear Doctor Instream, only as an example. Consciousness of any kind is merely the direction in which the self looks. I told you this at our brief meeting. Consciousness is the focus, the direction of focus. Your ordinary consciousness is as much a trance state as any trance state induced through hypnotism. Therefore it is nearly impossible to convince a subject in trance that something he does not see exists.

If you have already suggested that the table does not exist for him, he will never see the table. The table will not seem to exist. The table will not exist in actuality for this subject in the trance state. It ceases to have any meaning for him at all. Nor will he recall or remember any meaning for him that that table might once have had.

I realize only too well that reincarnation is a shady subject by far, most unpopular. I assure you however that in any discussion with your psychologists on this matter, I shall hold my own. Again, the attention, the energy of all human personalities, as a rule, are severely focused in one scope of reality only. They are indeed in a trance.

(Seth has discussed the God concept and related subjects in the following sessions, among others: 31, 51, 62, 66, 81, 95, 97, 115, 135, 147, 149, 146, 151.)

(None of us asked questions that might lead to totally new, unfamiliar material that we might wish later was recorded. Bill wanted to ask Seth to comment on the God concept, but thought this was a complicated subject. He settled instead for a question pertaining to a large wooden Tibetan statue he and Peg had purchased in Ithaca, NY. To our surprise this subject developed a few complications of its own.