“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Direct cognition is an inner sense. In physical terms you might call it remote sensing. Your physical body, and your physical existence, are based upon certain kinds of direct cognition, and it is responsible for the very functioning of the reasoning mind itself. Scientists like to say that animals operate through simple instinctive behavior, without will or volition: It is no accomplishment for a spider to make its web, a beaver its dam, a bird its nest, because according to such reasoning, such creatures cannot perform otherwise. The spider must spin his web. If he chooses not to, he will not survive. But by that same reasoning—to which, of course, I do not subscribe—you should also add that man can take no credit either for his intellect, since man must think, and cannot help doing so.

(9:33.) Man’s reasoning mind, however, with its fascinating capacity for logic and deduction, and for observation, rests upon (pause) a direct cognition—a direct cognition that powers his thoughts, that makes thinking itself possible. He thinks because he knows how to think by thinking (intently), even though the true processes of thought are enigmas to the reasoning mind.¹

1. With a little reflection it becomes obvious, but I think it important to note that Jane’s expression of the Seth material is certainly the result of her direct cognition. Because she has to deliver it linearly in words, which take “time,” she cannot produce her material almost at once, as the mathematical prodigy can his or her answers, but in their own way her communications with Seth are as psychologically clear and direct as the calculator’s objective products are with numbers, or the musician’s are with notes. From the very beginning of the sessions, in late 1963, I appreciated the speed with which Jane delivered the Seth material, and began recording the times involved throughout each session. I now think that spontaneously starting to do that reflected my own intuitive understanding of her direct cognition, long before either one of us knew how to describe it. And when Jane speaks extemporaneously for Seth, her delivery is even more rapid. It was most definitely faster—sometimes spectacularly so—during all of those years she gave sessions in ESP class.

Now, some of those children went on to become great musicians, while others lost their abilities along the way, so what are we dealing with in such cases? We are dealing with direct knowing. We are dealing with the natural perceptions of the psyche, at least when we are speaking in human terms. We are dealing with natural, direct cognition as it exists before and after (pause) man’s experience with the reasoning mind.

[...] This fifth sense differs from the fourth [conceptual sense] in that it does not involve cognition of a concept. [...]

[...] It involves direct instantaneous cognition of the essence of living ‘tissue.’ I use the word ‘tissue’ with caution and ask you not to think of it necessarily in terms of flesh.

[...]

“The fourth Inner Sense involves direct cognition of a concept in much more than intellectual terms. [...]

[...] If you become proficient in the use of the third Inner Sense [perception of past, present, and future] when cognition is more or less spontaneous, then you can utilize the conceptual sense with more freedom. [...]

[...] Now biologically that is direct cognition. [...] Direct cognition did not need the symbols. The first language, the initial language, did not involve images or words, but dealt with a free flow of directly cognitive material.

[...] I told her at the end of the day that the Seth material is an excellent example of her own direct cognition; this obvious description had come to me after I worked with Seth’s material on direct cognition in Chapter 6 of Dreams. [...]

The third inner sense, as I have told you, will enable you to some extent to free yourselves from the constructions of past, present and future, and will permit in theory instant cognition. As far as practice is concerned you will never achieve such instant cognition, but you will be able to set aside now and then the boundaries of time, and you will be able at least to glimmer the reality and the concepts of which I speak.

[...] When cognition is more or less spontaneous, then you can appreciate a concept on its own terms.

When cognition is spontaneous or nearly so, then the idea can have freedom. [...]

[...] However, the fourth inner sense involves again direct cognition, only now of a concept in much more than you would call intellectual terms.

[...] Consciousness not focused in cellular construction involves itself with a kind of direct cognition, involving comprehensions that come in a more circular fashion.

The creative act is your closest experience to direct cognition. [...]

[...] See the 102nd session for Bill’s cognition of open eyes upon Jane’s closed eyelids. [...]

The language or the method of communication can best be described perhaps as direct cognition. Direct cognition is dependent upon a lover’s kind of identification, where what is known is known. [...]

The fifth inner sense carries us further along in this direction, and involves what I will call cognition of the knowledgeable essence. This sense differs from the fourth inner sense in that it does not involve the cognition of a concept.

[...] It merely involves direct, instantaneous cognition of the essence of living tissue.

[...] The painted image can be taken in at a glance, at any stage of its development, but the cognition of the written word takes much more time, no matter how fast one reads or absorbs new material. [...] Not so the writer, who while reading must pass up the artist’s simultaneous perception for his own linear cognition as he makes a multitude of decisions involving sentence structure, what to use or eliminate, and so forth.

[...] “Even in a long book, he doesn’t go through any of those cognitive processes Rob mentions. [...]

[...] The first sense involves perception of a direct nature—instant cognition through what I can only describe as inner vibrational touch. [...]

(Here Seth refers to an article by Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, who wrote in Psychology Today for November, 1978 about the decline in his own cognitive abilities. [...]

A direct cognition is involved in which each consciousness knows what each other one is doing, its “position,” and the implications of its experience. [...]

[...] One of its services will be to teach Jane to free her inner cognitions enough so that she can translate Speaker manuscripts without distorting them out of all proportion.

[...] (Pause.) In following this particular line of development, Ruburt for example will be taught to free inner cognition from the recognized verbal patterns enough so that any future work with speakers manuscripts will not be stereotyped out of all proportion. [...]

[...] You are alive now, a consciousness knowing itself, sparkling with cognition amid a debris of dead and dying cells; alive while the atoms and molecules of your body die and are reborn. [...]

[...] (By direct knowing here, I mean instant cognition and comprehension, without symbolization.)

[...] Your intellect is a part of you — a vital, functioning portion of your cognitive processes — but it does not contain (underlined) your identity.

[...] This sort of experience is direct cognition. [...]