“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As I write this, I am picking up all sorts of information about my environment, but I am hardly aware of doing so. Certainly I don’t consciously separate visual and auditory data unless I stop to think of it, though I know I receive the information through different senses. All of the physical senses operate at once to give us our picture of reality. We use the Inner Senses the same way, constantly, far beneath usual conscious notice. In order to explain them, we must describe them separately, though their effects are felt together.

“Think of the Inner Senses as paths leading to an inner reality. The first sense involves perception of a direct nature—instant cognition through what I can only describe as inner vibrational touch. Imagine a man standing on a typical street of houses and grass and trees. This sense would permit him to feel the basic sensations felt by each of the trees about him. His consciousness would expand to contain the experience of what it is to be a tree—any or all of the trees. He would feel the experience of being anything he chose within his field of notice: people, insects, blades of grass. He would not lose consciousness of who he was, but would perceive these sensations somewhat in the same way that you now feel heat and cold.”

One night while Bill and Peg Gallagher were visiting us, a neighbor also came to call. Polly was a rather emotional young woman, and she asked me if I could “pick up” any impressions about her. I refused, saying that I was tired. Actually I felt that she was “highly charged,” unpleasantly so, and I didn’t want to get involved. Apparently my curiosity got the best of me. I switched to my Inner Senses to find out what was wrong—but without realizing that I was doing so. (In the use of the Inner Senses, like anything else, we have to learn discrimination and discretion.)

Almost instantly I saw the young woman back in 1950, as a teenager. She was in a hospital bed, having labor pains. I felt them, in my living room. The experience was exceptionally vivid, and the pain quite real. I saw an older woman and a young man in the hospital room and was able to describe them. Polly identified the people as a former husband and his mother, but denied having a child, though she said that a girl friend delivered an illegitimate daughter that same year.

At first the pain frightened me so that I just blurted out what was happening; I didn’t mean to embarrass Polly. Later I felt foolish and angry at myself, wondering if the pain episode was some kind of subconscious dramatization. Two years later Polly left town. Before she went, she called to tell me that the episode was quite legitimate. The child had been her own, and my description of the room tallied with her hospital room. Naturally, she didn’t want anyone to know about the child, who had been put up for adoption (and it was none of my business anyway). She had been brooding about the birth the night she visited us, because she had just heard from the baby’s father for the first time in years. Probably this is why I “tuned in” to the episode. In this case I used inner vibrational touch to become aware of her feelings.