“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your own consciousness as you think of it, as you are familiar with it, can indeed help lead you into some much greater understanding of the simultaneous nature of time³ if you allow it to. You often use tools, instruments, and paraphernalia instead — but they do not feel time, in those terms. You do. Studying your own conscious experience with time will teach you far more. Period.

Suppose that you stood in one spot all of your physical life, and that you had to do this because you had been told that you must. In such a case you would only see what was directly before you. Your peripheral vision might give you hints of what was to each side, or you might hear sounds that came from behind. Objects — birds, for example — might flash by you, and you might wonder at their motion, significance, and origin. If you suddenly turned an inch to the right or the left you would not be altering your body, but simply changing its position, increasing your overall picture, turning very cautiously from your initial position. So the little exercise above is like that.

Give us a moment … There are shapes and formations that appear when your eyes are closed that are perfect replicas of atoms, molecules, and cells, but you do not recognize them as such. There are also paintings — so-called abstracts — unconsciously produced, many by amateurs, that are excellent representations of such inner organizations.⁴

(10:08. Very forcefully all through here:) But most physicists do not trust felt answers. Feeling is thought to be far less valid than a diagram. It seems you could not operate your world on feelings — but you are not doing very well trying to operate with diagrams, either!

In many cases your scientists seem to have the strange idea that you can understand a reality by destroying it; that you can perceive the life mechanism of an animal by killing it; or that you can examine a phenomenon best by separating yourself from it. So, often, you attempt to examine the nature of the brain in man by destroying the brains of animals, by separating portions of the animal brain from its components, isolating them, and tampering with the overall integrity of both the animal in question and of your own spiritual processes. By this I mean that each such attempt puts you more out of context, so to speak, with yourself and your environment, and other species. Period. While you may “learn” certain so-called facts, you are driven still further away from any great knowledge, because the so-called facts stand in your way. You do not as yet understand the uniqueness of consciousness.

(“No,” I said, although I was feeling the pace a bit. But Jane was doing well.)

There are ways of identifying with animals, with atoms and molecules. There are ways of learning from the animals. There are methods that can be used to discover how different species migrate, for example, and then to duplicate such feats technologically if you want to. These methods do not include dissection, for what you learn that way you will not be able to use (deeper and much louder).

3. A note added five months later: For some of Seth’s early remarks about time, see the excerpts from the 14th session (for January 8, 1964) in Chapter 4 of The Seth Material. I quoted a few lines from the same session midway through the Introductory Notes for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality (as well as after the 724th session in Volume 2), and considered some thoughts about our attempts to grasp Seth’s concept of simultaneous time. The notes introducing this first volume also contain other applicable material having to do with Jane’s trance production times for the Seth books.

4. As an artist myself, I’ve occasionally wondered if some abstract paintings could have such origins. It’s quite possible that I’ve talked about this with Jane, although I don’t remember doing so at any particular time.

5. In physics, questioning is certainly the mode of the day, however, even if in its own terms. Two months ago a prominent East Coast newspaper carried a long article about the “turmoil” and “confusion” in which modern physics finds itself because of recent discoveries on atomic and subatomic levels. Many of these new facts contradict respected old facts, and are leading to previously unheard of, or rejected, questions having to do with internal structures for such near-dimensionless processes as the electron, which moves about the atomic nucleus, and for the various “heavier” particles that make up the nucleus itself.