“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Mankind’s consciousness, however, experimented along time-specific lines. As he developed along those lines, various biological and mental methods of selectivity and discrimination were utilized. When in historic terms mankind became aware of memory, and recalled his past as a past in your terms, it was possible for him to confuse past and present. Vivid memories, out of context but given immediate neurological validity, could compete with the brilliant focus necessary in his present.¹

Though the past is actually quite as immediate, alive, and creative as the present is, man made certain adjustments, on several layers, that would focus definite distinctions and set past and present experience apart. While your particular kind of consciousness was developing, it began to intensify selectivity, to concentrate specifically in a small area of activity while blocking out other data. This was necessary because the particular kind of physical manipulation of corporal existence required instant physical response to immediately present stimuli.

(9:55.) Such selectivity and specialization therefore represented a pertinent method, as consciousness familiarized itself with earthly experience. Hunters had to respond at once to the present situation. In time terms, the “present” animal had to be killed for food — not the “past” animal. That animal — the past one — existed as surely as the one presently perceived, yet in man’s context, physical action had to be directed to a highly specific area, for physical survival depended upon it.

(Pause, and slowly:) The cells’ basic innocence of time discrimination had to be bypassed. At deeply unconscious levels the neurological structure is more highly adaptable than it appears. Adjustments were made, therefore. Basically, the neurological structure responds to both past and future data. Biologically, then, such activity is built-in. The specialized “new” kind of consciousness in one body had to respond pinpoint fast. Therefore it focused upon only one series of neurological messages.

These became more and more biologically prominent, so that man’s consciousness rode them, or leaped upon them. These particular pulses or messages became the biologically and mentally accepted ones. They were clued into sense perception, then. These pulses or messages became the only official data that, translated into sense perception, formed physical reality. This selectivity gave an understandable line of reference from interior to exterior existence.

(10:10. Deliberately but intently:) Other quite-as-valid messages were ignored. They became, while present, biologically invisible. The cells still reacted to these otherwise neglected pulses, as they needed data from both the past and future to maintain the body’s balance in “the present.” The necessity for immediate conscious exterior action at a “definite” point of intersection with events was left to the emerging ego consciousness.

While the cells required future and past data, and used it to form from that invisible tension the body’s present corporal reality, the same kind of information could be a threat then to the ego consciousness, which could be overwhelmed. Within the corporal structure, however, there are indeed messages that leap too quickly or too slowly² from your viewpoint to allow for any physical response. In that way cellular comprehension is allowed its free flow; but the selectivity mentioned (in sessions 682–3) bypasses such information, so that it does not conflict with present sense data requiring physical action in time.

When man, speaking in your terms of history, began to experiment with memory, there were innumerable instances where the emerging ego consciousness did not distinguish clearly enough between the past and present, as you understand them.

It would have been quite possible for you as a race to have chosen any other “series” of neurological pulses, or messages, as the “real” ones, and to structure your experience along different lines. The biological structure and the mental consciousness together, however, chose the most comfortable sequence in which a present area of activity, brought about by neurological recognition, would be backed up by unconscious mental knowledge and other biologically invisible neurological connections.

The psyche knows itself and is aware of its parts. When ego consciousness reached a certain point of biological and mental competence, when experience in the present became extensive enough, then ego consciousness would be at the stage where it could begin to accept greater data. Indeed, it is now at that stage.

(Pause at 10:37.) Its focus in the present is now secure. That focus finally brought about, in your terms, an expansion of consciousness, and one that early man did not have to handle. In your terms, time now includes more space, and hence more experience and stimuli. Again speaking historically, in the past the private person in any given hour was aware at once only of those events happening in his immediate environment. He could respond instantly. Events were, to that extent now, manageable. And rest your hand if you want to.

(10:57.) These developments, with others, are already triggering changes in man’s behavior, and inspiring him toward further alterations of consciousness. He now needs a more expansive viewpoint of past and future in order to help him deal with the ramifications of the present as it has evolved through experience.

Recognized concepts of the self are the ego’s interpretation of selfhood. They are projected into concepts of God and the universe. They meet with a certain biological validity because of the selectivity earlier mentioned, whereby only one series of neurological pulses is accepted — and upon these rides the reality of the egotistical self. At one “time” a god interpreted in those terms served as a model for the egotistical behavior of one self toward another self.

(Slowly:) In a world in which individuals were confined in space in a tribe or clan (a one-minute pause), action was immediate. The environment presented a framework in which consciousness learned to deal with stimuli in a direct fashion. It learned how to focus. The necessary specialization meant that only so much data could be handled at once, emotionally or otherwise. The formation of different tribes allowed man to behave cooperatively, in small numbers. This meant that those on the outside were selectively ignored, considered strangers.

(Intently:) At that point, consciousness in those terms could not handle focused concentration, the emergence of ego consciousness, and simultaneously experience powerful feelings of oneness with other large groups. It was struggling for individuation.

Individuation, however, was dependent upon the cooperation of individuals. As the ego learned to feel more secure, the cooperative tendencies broadened so that the growth of nations was possible. It was inevitable, however, that ego consciousness would produce a reality in which it would finally need, in those terms, to accept other data and information that in the beginning it had to ignore.

New paragraph (and more rapidly): As egotistical consciousness expands to include hereto largely neglected data, then it will experience, practically speaking, a new kind of identity; knowing itself differently. Its concepts of godhood will significantly alter, as will the dimensions of emotion. Your heritage includes vastly richer veins of love, yet your concepts of self and godhood have severely limited these. You often seem to hate those with different beliefs than your own, for example, and you have perpetrated cruelties upon others in the name of religion and in the name of science, because your limited ideas about the nature of the self led you to fear your emotions. Often you are afraid that love will overwhelm you, for instance.

(Jane said that I might better ask questions only during break, at least for now. My inquiry about early man hadn’t “seriously” disturbed her; but I’d been correct in feeling that I shouldn’t have interrupted her then. She also talked about possible confusions or conflicts between Seth doing “Unknown” Reality while she was writing her own Adventures in Consciousness. She’s had no trouble, however, and is still enthusiastic about her book; she’s putting Chapter 4 into final form. Adventures is due at her publishers, Prentice-Hall, Inc., in September 1974.

The child was himself in the past on the one hand, and yet he was a probable future self in that past. (Pause.) From the standpoint of Ruburt’s official mental focus, and from the standpoint of the neurologically accepted present, that past environment had to remain off-center, or blurred. He could experience it only by sidestepping officially accepted neurological activity. He visited a store that is not at that location “anymore,” and here the sense data were somewhat clearer. He had no conscious memories of the store’s interior, yet it was instantly apparent to him — the dark oiled floor, spread with sawdust. Even the odors were present.

He went from place to place, floating bodiless — a tour of consciousness. That same environment exists now, alternately with Ruburt’s present, and as vividly as his present does. It was, however, from his viewpoint, a probable past.⁴

He sensed the house interior and the stairway vividly. He knew that the mother then went down the stairs to bring in the carriage, but when he tried to perceive this, the motion became too fast. The mother’s figure blurred so completely that he could not follow it. He felt confused, and found himself entering the store around the corner, and then consciously circled the block and went into the school.

As part of the work on this book, Ruburt is just beginning to experiment with the conscious recognition of probable material, and the conscious acceptance of kinds of experience usually tabooed according to the selectivity already mentioned.

(12:19.) In the sleep state after our last session, then, he allowed his consciousness to expand enough so that it became aware of information and experience usually censored automatically through mental and neurological habit. In Adventures Ruburt uses the term “prejudiced perception” — an excellent one — that is applicable here. For you have prejudiced yourself spiritually, mentally, and physically in those terms. In the sleep state Ruburt became unprejudiced, at least to some degree, so that he encountered information that seemed alien or out of context with usual experience.

Your theories of time are connected with your usual neurological pulses. It is one thing to play with concepts of multidimensionality, or probabilities, and quite another to be practically presented with them, even briefly, when your thought patterns and neurological habits tell you that they cannot be translated. So Ruburt felt frustrated, and he told me in no uncertain terms (see Appendix 4) that his consciousness could not contain the information he was receiving.

Like a good teacher (humorously), I took his protests into consideration. Later he wrote a statement that came to him. This was his conscious interpretation of the information he had received the night before, translated as best he could in linear terms.

You may experience some irritability with some of the concepts in it, simply because you have so schooled yourselves to ignore them. You should also experience an acceleration of consciousness, however, and as you read it, a growing sense of familiarity. The framework of the book itself will lead you, if you allow it, into other strata of your own greater knowledge.