“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For two and a half hours I spoke on the potentials of human personality, and the necessity of recognizing, developing, and using them. To the best of my ability, I explained what telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition were, and what experiments might be conducted to show them in operation. Finally I suggested an exercise to be done by the students, such as we sometimes use in my own classes. A target sketch was to be tacked on the inside of my door each day. The girls would try to “pick up” an impression of the target drawing and reproduce it. I would mail my drawings to the professor at the end of the allotted time, and he could judge the hits and misses for himself.

There were about ten of my regular students at the session. Seth was at his best: smiling, often breaking up serious material with a few light jokes or comments. Most of the time he spoke directly to the student who requested the session, or addressed the sixty members of her psychology class, who were not present. The whole session ran about six single-typed pages.

Seth ended this discussion by outlining various ways to develop awareness of the inner self. This material will be given in a later chapter. My student played the tape during her next college class, and since it ran longer than the allotted time, the psychology professor and some of the students went to her house later to hear the whole tape and discuss it.

Seth says that even in this life, each of us has various egos; we only accept the idea of one ego as a sort of shorthand symbolism. The ego at any given time in this life is simply the part of us that “surfaces”; a group of characteristics that the inner self uses to solve various problems. Even the ego as we think of it changes constantly. For example, the Jane Roberts of now is different from the Jane Roberts of ten years ago, though “I” have not been conscious of any particular change of identity.

Of course, these abilities don’t mean much unless you learn to use them and experience them for yourself. Early in our sessions Seth described what he calls the Inner Senses—inner methods of perception that expand normal consciousness and allow us to become aware of our own multidimensional existence. It was some time before we fully understood what these meant, and how we could use them, and we are still learning to use them more effectively.

At the time, we were having sessions in the bedroom, which is small, with one window looking out on the large yard. It was summer; hardly anyone knew of the sessions yet, and Seth’s full voice, rising out on the nighttime air, would have raised questions we weren’t ready to answer. As he has done since the beginning, Rob sat with pen and paper, taking verbatim notes. He often felt quite warm, since we closed the window to keep the sessions as private as possible, particularly since neighbors were often sitting in the yard. (The heat never bothers me when I’m in trance, although otherwise I’m very susceptible to it.)

“Action [inner vitality] can never complete itself. Materializing in any form whatsoever, it at once multiplies the possibilities of further materialization. At the same time, because inner vitality is self-generating, only a minute fraction of it is needed to seed a universe.

“I mentioned, in our last discussion, that this material would be the basis for future sessions. It is true that another dimension has been added to the sessions, and I hope to instruct Ruburt along the lines of more direct perception as we continue. I told you that such developments could be expected. These are natural unfoldings and will continue according to their own nature and in their own time. I expect that this latest development will involve still another.”

This sort of thing began to happen frequently in sessions. Later we took it for granted, I guess, without realizing what an impression it made on us the first time. My experiences usually parallel whatever information Seth is giving. According to Seth, this involves the use of the Inner Senses, and my experiences are meant to point up the existence of these abilities not only in me, but as the latent capabilities of each personality.

To some extent Rob and I have experienced most of these Inner Senses to some degree. Take a fairly simple one—Psychological Time. Seth says, “From within its framework you will see that physical time is as dreamlike as you once thought inner time was. You will discover your whole selves, peeping inward and outward at the same ‘time,’ and find that all time is one time, and all divisions, illusions.”

When we do “Psy-Time,” as Rob and I call it, our experiences seem to take place outside of the usual time framework. It’s like shifting gears, so that perception happens in a different context. Psy-Time is the “time” I travel in when I’m projecting, for example. When I went to California in the episode mentioned in Chapter 9, over six thousand miles were covered in a half hour. Obviously, in normal time, this would be impossible.

A deeper appreciation of this subject requires more information about the real nature of time, however; because according to Seth the inner self operates not within time as we know it, but through perceptions that largely ignore time as we know it.

The question comes up, then: How can we ignore time? What is there about ourselves, or time, that we can disconnect one from the other? Some of you may not be interested in such questions, but others will feel cheated if they are left unanswered. Seth does not ignore such issues, and I’m closing this chapter with a few excerpts in which he considers them. Here Seth partially explains the nature of time, and shows why we are basically free of it.

From Session 224: The Personality and Time

“Every action changes every other action—we go back to our ABC’s. Therefore, every action in your present affects those actions you call past. Ripples from a thrown stone go out in all directions, and I am going out rather far on the limb myself right here. Remembering what you know of the nature of time, you realize that the apparent boundaries between past, present, and future are only illusions caused by the amount of action you can physically perceive.

“Now this couple represented a sort of time-projection, for literally you could have become what they were. This existed in that present as a probability. You perceived that portion of the probable future and reacted to it, and the possible transformation of yourselves into those images did not occur. Because past, present, and future exist simultaneously, there is no reason why you cannot react to an event whether or not it happens to fall within the small field of reality in which you usually observe and participate.

“The inner self can, indeed, perceive events that will occur after physical death. It never was imprisoned by ego time. Its perceptions are merely inhibited by the ego. The inner self can perceive events that will occur to itself after death, and those in which it is not involved.

“All of this applies unless, of course, an individual is taken completely out of the physical time system. A murdered man will not be returned whole and intact to physical life [though he may return as a ‘spirit,’ believing he is still alive].

We were to discover that these ideas were not just theoretical. In the following chapter I’ll tell you of one of the strangest experiences of my life—one in which I was swept out of the world of time and space and then, just as suddenly, thrown back into it again.