1 result for (book:ur1 AND heading:"introductori note by robert f butt" AND stemmed:ident)
[... 39 paragraphs ...]
In his laboratories, man thus has great opportunities to obtain preprogrammed answers, based on what he thinks he already knows; his exteriorized equipment can hardly produce anything else. (A scientist doesn’t call an atom of oxygen, or one of any other element, alive, let alone conscious. Yet a collection of certain atoms assembled into a human form calls itself alive — and vehemently denies the same status to identical atoms that have the misfortune to exist outside of that human framework.) But some of the reasons for our exceedingly poor understanding of the general human state are discussed by Seth in the material he’s given over the last decade, and I’m sure there is much more to come.
[... 4 paragraphs ...]
“As Jane, I’m not discarded when I’m in such a trance. Yet I step out of my Jane-self in some indescribable way, and step right back into it when the session is over. So there must be another ‘I’ who leaves Jane patiently waiting at the shore while ‘I’ dive headlong into those other dimensions of experience and identity. Once the almost instant transformation is over, ‘I’ become Seth or Seth becomes what I am. And in that state, the conditions of perception are those native to other lands of consciousness than ours.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
“In many ways, we’re a lonely species. We seem to be forever prowling around the confines of our own nature. Maybe our idea of identity is like a magic circle we’ve drawn around our minds, so that everything outside seems dark and alien, unselflike. There may be other psychic fires lighting up that inner landscape with a far greater light than ours; other aspects of consciousness to which we’re connected as surely as we’re connected also to the animals in a chain of being we barely comprehend.
[... 13 paragraphs ...]