“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“At 8:45 I walked into the living room to waken Jane for the evening’s session. She continued to lie quietly on the couch, eyes closed, but in a few minutes told me she’d just been visited by a most strange sensation. From her description of it I thought she might have been exploring an ability related to the inner senses. So far, Seth has explained six of these. (Several years later, Jane was to list nine such inner senses in Chapter 19 of The Seth Material.) Jane said that upon coming slowly awake from her nap she’d had the very peculiar feeling of ‘growing larger.’ The laughing phrase she used was that she’d felt as ‘big as an elephant.’ Her boundaries of awareness seemed to have expanded. Holding her hands up on either side of her head, she indicated a width of almost three feet; her head had literally felt that wide to her.

“Jane added that when we close our eyes we’re aware of a certain ‘area of blackness,’ one we’re used to. While she’d been in this unusual state, that area was much enlarged — she used the words ‘infinitely large’ to describe it. Jane said it was as though her eyes had actually moved further apart to create this expanded field of awareness, of infinite black. She hadn’t sensed anything happening within this area, but thought that she might have, given more knowledge and experience. She hadn’t been frightened by the sensation, and went along with it. She didn’t have it now that her eyes were open, yet the physical feeling of enlargement had been so strong there could be no doubt of it …

“As we talked, Jane suddenly announced that her experience had triggered her memory: She’d had similar sensations of enlargement twice before. Both took place before she started the sessions late in 1963; one in October, 1963, say, and the other one over a year before that perhaps in March, 1962. She couldn’t be sure of either date. She felt each one upon awakening from a nap, but with her eyes still closed. Neither event had made as much of an impression on her as tonight’s experience, for she hadn’t sensed the odd, infinite black within the expanded area of the skull. Since she’d been alone on each occasion, she simply forgot to tell me about either one of them.”

I am rather surprised that Ruburt hit upon this one at this time, as it is usually a rather difficult ability to attain…. Ruburt experienced this on a physical level, trying to translate inner data into sensation that could be recognized by the outer senses. This seventh inner sense represents an extension of the self, a widening of its conscious comprehension … or a pulling together into … a minute capsule that enables the self to enter other fields.

(So Jane experienced a modest series of unusual psychic events before the sessions themselves began; some details on these have been given in earlier notes. Her first massive sensations in March [estimated], 1962, were followed by these phenomena in 1963: our York Beach experiences in August; her reception of Idea Construction in September; her massive feelings in October [estimated]; the outline she produced for ESP Power [or The Coming of Seth] as a result of the Idea Construction adventure; and the beginning of these sessions in November, through our trying certain experiments listed in that outline [as Jane explains in Chapter 1 of The Seth Material]. It didn’t occur to us to label any of those events as “psychic” until the event of Idea Construction. Listing them as I’ve done here is also apt to artificially set them aside from the flow of insights within the poetry Jane has written since childhood; actually, of course, all are related.