“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Physically we can only handle so much data at once, since we are dependent in that respect upon our neurological structure. Each sensation we have received since our birth is still intact in the subconscious. We push such details “back” so that we can handle the present. We focus our attention upon a certain group of events—the “present” ones—and then drop them into the subconscious where they seem to fall away and become distant. If we could keep our attention on these past events and still concentrate on the present ones simultaneously, then our sense of present time would be immeasurably enlarged.

If so, how independent would he be? The question can’t be answered easily. Certainly he wouldn’t be present within my personality structure as I know it. I don’t believe, for example, that his presence would be disclosed by any psychological testing of my own personality. The inherent relationship would snap into focus during a session, however, when the supraconscious identity would take over.

Obviously I’ve avoided calling Seth a spirit and leaving it at that. I don’t like the phrase for one thing, and for another, I think that this is too easy an answer. In accepting one solution, we may be closing our minds to others that lie beneath. I am not saying that Seth is just a psychological structure allowing me to tune into revelational knowledge, nor denying that he has an independent existence. I do think that some kind of blending must take place in sessions between his personality and mine, and that this “psychological bridge”’ itself is a legitimate structure that must take place in any such communication. Seth is at his end, I am at mine. I agree with Seth here. I don’t think it is a relatively simple matter of a medium just blacking out and acting like a telephone connection. I do think that Seth is part of another entity, and that he is something quite different from, say, a friend who has “survived” death.

“Such a book would also include my methods of entry into your system and the sort of psychological bridge personality that results. Again: what you have in sessions is not my complete identity. There must be some sort of psychological structure present for me to use during my communications. At times, however, my identity comes through clearly enough so that, comparatively speaking, I can exist independently, as myself, without Ruburt’s assistance.

“Now whether or not a medium is in a trance that is as deep as the Atlantic Ocean, the medium will not be a pure channel. The ego simply will be bypassed, but the other layers of the self, and the neurological structures particularly, will continue to operate as always. They will be altered by the perceptions that pass through them.”

“Information can rarely flow like crystal-clear water, with the medium [as] a faucet to be turned off and on at will. It must be sifted through the layers of the medium’s personality. The nervous system reacts to the data even as it translates it. Nothing is neutral in those terms. The information is received and translated, as it must be, into mechanisms which the nervous system can handle and interpret. Like any perception, the information then becomes a part of the nervous system’s structure. It cannot be otherwise.

“Any perception instantly alters the electromagnetic and neurological systems of the perceiver. In your terms this is what a perception is: an alteration of neurological structure. The receiving mechanisms themselves change, and are changed by that which they perceive. I am speaking here of the physical nature of any perception.

“It is a logistic contradiction to imagine, with your physical structures, that any perception can be received without the perceiver’s inner situation being altered. I am trying to make it as clear as possible—information automatically blends with, is intermingled with, and enmeshed with, the entire physically valid structure of the personality.