“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Psychological time adds duration. You will find something else here. From the framework of psychological time you will see that clock time is as dreamlike and fleeting as you once thought inner time was. And you will discover that inner time is as much a reality as you once thought outer time was. You will discover your whole selves in other worlds, peeping inward and outward at the same time, and finding that all time is one time, and that all divisions are illusion.

Incidentally again, hypnosis also helps you to use psychological time to a true advantage. The boundaries of clock time melt when psychological time is utilized. You can look through psychological time at clock time, and even use clock time to your advantage; but without the initial recognition of psychological time, then clock time is somewhat of a prison.

Psychological time fits into physical time with little trouble. Originally this enabled man in many ways to live in the inner and the outer world with relative ease. Psychological time can be transposed onto physical time, but psychological time cannot flow unhampered or with any freedom through days chopped up into so many clock divisions. The clock time idea was invented by the conscious ego of man for many various reasons, with fear in the foreground.

This is going to be a rather brief session comparatively. One note I wanted to make: As I have said, psychological time is a natural connective to the inner world. Though you experience days or hours within the framework of psychological time during the dream state, and yet do not age for a comparable amount of physical time, so as you develop in your use of psychological time you will be able to rest and be refreshed within the framework of psychological time while you are consciously awake. This will aid your mental and physical state to an amazing degree, and you will discover added vitality on the one hand, and a somewhat decreased need to sleep on the other.

From its framework you will see that clock time is as dreamlike as you once thought inner time was. You will discover that ‘inner time’ is as much a reality as you once considered outer time to be. In other words, peeping inwards and outwards at the same ‘time’ you will find that all divisions are illusion and all time is one time. [...]

You can look through psychological time at clock time and even use clock time then to your greater advantage; but without the initial recognition of psychological time, clock time becomes a prison. … A proper use of psychological time will not only lead you to inner reality but will prevent you from being rushed in the physical world. [...]

[...] As you can experience days or hours within its framework in the dream state and not age for the comparable amount of physical time, so as you develop, you will be able to rest and be refreshed within psychological time even when you are awake. [...] Within any given five minutes of clock time, for example, you may find an hour of resting which is independent of clock time.

This is closely related to the second inner sense, and it is upon psychological time that you must try to transpose your inner visions. [...] For instance, when I tell you that the second inner sense is like your sense of time, this does give you some understanding of what psychological time is like, but you are apt to compare the two too closely.

Time therefore is formed out of and from nontime. (Long pause.) Non-time is psychological experience, psychological reality, and time is always at its service. (Long pause.) Entities then form the time in which they seem to dwell. [...]

[...] Form, like time, is an aid, an organization of experience. Form is used as time structures may be used, but multidimensional personalities know that they construct form as they may construct various time systems as an aid toward organizing perception.

Now, there are some systems that do deal with a serial time unit, but in these the personalities are well aware that the serial time is of their own construction. Certain types of personalities will construct or be attracted to certain time systems. [...]

[...] Any time structure is an aid, organizing experience along certain lines. [...] You are learning to handle perception and experience, and time gives it to you in slow and small doses.

His pursuit of truth led his mind outward through time. [...] I use time. Time, again, can be lengthened, shortened. [...] These frameworks, one way or another, always involve alterations in time, even as Ruburt’s James and Cézanne books from the library involve information not usually available in Framework 1’s time sequence.

The physical time was nothing—a few hours—and physical time had to pass for the writing of the books. Yet those books will also influence future time in an important fashion. They represent concentrated experience in which Ruburt threw aside “for a time” the known beliefs of Framework 1, its laws and regulations.

The events of time in such a case from the outside might seem to change drastically, while those inside our time structures would not notice any change, in a Framework 1 level. [...] On that level no change occurs, but the foreshortening of time can allow you and Nebene to interact if you want to, or if he does, so that images, ideas, and other interchanges can occur in a way that does not dislodge or disarray a moment of your physical time, or his.

In Framework 2 in your terms, time is foreshortened, and work is done there in a flash, so to speak. Some time may be involved physically for the materialization, but in usual terms the foreshortening effect can be quite startling, for time is affected and used in an entirely different fashion. [...]

You must simply and practically try to divest yourself of all ideas of time as you know it, for this discussion. Basically, what you call time does not exist. [...] The question of time and entities then, you see, cannot be truly answered in the manner in which you asked it.

The entity and its time are not separate. [...] Basically time is simply psychological experience, regardless of the lapses between perception or the manner of perception. [...]

Time could be thought of as the tissues of the entity. [...] Your own time structure would be very minute in this picture.

[...] What I am trying to tell you is that a thought or a feeling, with all its varieties of intensities, is more like time, like the true nature of time, than all of your minutes or hours.

It might take you years, possibly, to thoroughly discuss all of the ramifications of that insight, but the original creation comes from Framework 2 into your time. Taking it for granted, again, that physical limitations of time exist. Nevertheless when you become overly concerned with the seeming shortness or lack of time, it is almost always because you have fallen back to conventional ideas: you have only so many moments in a day. But the conventional version says, really, that those are surface moments; that you, say, run from one to the next, as if time were a moving sidewalk with the past moment vanishing forever. [...]

[...] I am saying that you should change your beliefs concerning the nature of time and creativity—and for Ruburt, time, creativity, responsibility, and work. (Pause.) If you become more aware of those issues, the time that you have, all of it, will quite literally seem to expand. Ruburt in one moment is often mulling over and mentally arranging his time. [...]

(Today Jane had been very upset because her control of time seemed so faulty that she wasn’t getting all the things done through the day that she wanted to accomplish—writing, exercises, seeing an occasional visitor, using the phone—whatever she might have wanted to do on any particular day. [...] The rest of my time had been devoted to chores, it seemed, and both of us felt the day had slipped by without our knowing it. [...]

(Pause.) Time. It takes so much physical time to perform any given number of physical activities.

[...] You have believed that so much time “spent” had to produce “so much” creative work, or creative product. (Loudly:)You even more than Ruburt—and that is saying something—have connected creativity and time in a way that is detrimental. [...] Your painting time, I tell you—listen to me—had basically nothing to do with clock time. It takes a certain amount of “time” physically to work with a brush. Beyond that, the inspiration of your soul can speak in three minutes, and give you the inspirations of a lifetime (loudly)—but not while you insist that creative time and physical time coincide. This has to do with Ruburt’s symptoms, for he felt that he must be at his desk so many hours, whatever the number, and you became so obsessed with the amount of physical hours that you had to devote to painting that you began to divide up your psyche in terms of time.

[...] Your ideas of time, jointly and individually, have hampered your creativity. There seems to be a dilemma in terms of time. [...] As long as you insist upon identifying creative time with physical time, the dilemma will be real. Your work on the book will be slow, for you will be sure that it “must take so much time.” [...] Your painting “must take so much time.” [...]

[...] Your notes for the book can come easily, literally in half the time they do now take because of your beliefs. (Although I’m not aware of having any complaints here.) Your painting in physical terms can take half the physical time that it now takes because of your beliefs. [...] Your creativity seems to have burst the practical elements of time. That is, your painting, Ruburt’s work, and my books seems to be “too much” in terms of time only because you have not let your intuitive understanding of creativity grow with your experience. [...]

[...] At the same time my own distress physically led me to ask my own pendulum questions. [...] I also found out, though, that this time the pendulum gave me such a variety of responses —different ones each day, practically—that at first I didn’t know how much stock to put in its answers. [...] The pendulum told me I was worrying about everything from taking too long in producing The “Unknown” Reality to stewing about spending too much time painting, to worrying about my own seeming lack of income. [...]

The time that any artistic creator is involved with follows earth’s own time, however. The creator’s time rises out of the seasons and the tides, even though in your society you make a great effort to fit the creator’s time into what I will call assembly-line time. [...]

Assembly-line time does not really value time — only as time can be used for definite prescribed purposes. In that framework, to enjoy time becomes a weakness or a vice, and both of you to some extent have so considered time. [...]

Important misunderstandings involving time have been in a large measure responsible for many of Ruburt’s difficulties, and also of your own, though they have been of a lesser nature. [...] There is certainly a kind of natural physical time in your experience, and in the experience of any creature. [...] In the light of that kind of physical time, which is involved within earthly biology, there is no (pause) basic cultural time. [...]

[...] When you were both working on those projects your cultural time was taken up in a way you found acceptable. Creative time and cultural time to some extent merged, in that you could see daily immediate evidence of creativity’s product, coming out of the typewriters, say, like any product off an assembly line. You were “using” time as your cultural training told you to do.

Time is an apple. Time is no apple. Time (smile) is a worm in an apple. Time is a worm not in an apple; and yet such definitions will be absolutely meaningless to most people, for they can only think of time in terms of days or hours, and they do not think of time as experience itself, or quite simply, being.

[...] Since time does not exist in such a manner, then you must not project your ideas of time upon basic reality.

[...] If such is the case with personalities so closely allied with your own, then you can perhaps understand how alien your idea of time is to personalities that have never existed within your physical system. They are used to experiencing events not in any time sequence. [...]

[...] The time concept is but one example, and it is responsible for many of your most cherished misconceptions. [...] The time scheme appears valid only within that framework.

You want to examine life, to experience it, and yet in some way find in time a safe dimension apart from time. [...] On the other hand, they rob you in time of that second life you want, in which to examine your experiences.

[...] Almost all of Ruburt’s difficulty with time, and your own, spring from this basic quandary. For most people do not try that hard to preserve the living moment, or to understand it, while they are still involved with time’s physical package. [...] A bold venture, and one that fits in quite will with your intents jointly to understand and preserve fleeting reality, and one that conflicts with your attempts to do this in the context of one physical time that passes.

Ruburt, therefore, became somewhat overly concerned with physical time. He must allow himself greater freedom creatively, in a playful manner, forgetting all thoughts “at the time” of time.

[...] Jane has been extremely sore in her arms, shoulders, rib cage, and so forth today, yet she was able to stand taller, by leaning against the bathroom door frame, than I’d seen her do in a very long time. It’s part of the rhythmic healing process going on in her body, as Seth described it recently, moving through different areas successively, followed each time by new releases. [...]

1. In the 13th session for January 6, 1964, Seth told us: “I will at a later date try to discuss the question of time. [...] And, of course, Seth has been taking time to talk about time ever since. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality see, for instance, his opening delivery for Session 688: “These CU’s (or units of consciousness) therefore can operate even within time, as you understand it, in ways that are most difficult to explain. Time not only goes backward and forward, but inward and outward.”

Give us a moment … Time periods themselves, then, are somewhat like platforms — natural platforms — that serve “time and time again” to bring forth fresh life. [...] It seems to you that 1940 is gone, though it was the time of your birth. [...]

You are only aware of your own position within time, or your own place on the “platform,” or the ledge as you understand it.¹ Not only do these ledges or platforms of time exist simultaneously, but each one brings forth its own batches of personalities in its own different seasons. [...]

(Pause.) Time multiplies from within itself. When you think in terms of reincarnation, you are still dealing with very simple time concepts. [...]

“Psychological Time is a natural pathway that was meant to give an easy route of access from the inner world to the outer, and back again, though you do not use it as such. Psychological Time originally enabled man to live in the inner and outer worlds with relative ease. [...] It adds duration to your normal time. From its framework you will see that physical time is as dreamlike as you once thought inner time was. [...]

Actually, in practice, Psychological Time leads to development of the other Inner Senses. In Psy-Time, as we call it, you simply turn your focus of attention inward. [...]

Gradually as you progress, you will feel apart from time as we know it during the exercise. [...] I sometimes have out-of-body travels, for instance, during Psy-Time. [...]

[...]

This time reference is perhaps the most important within earth experience, and the one that most influences all creatures. In experience or existence outside of time (pause), there is no necessity to make certain kinds of judgments. In an out-of-time reference, theoretically speaking now, an infinite number of directions can be followed at once. Earth’s time reference, however, brought to experience a new brilliant focus—and in the press of time, again, certain activities would be relatively more necessary than others, relatively more pleasant or unpleasant than others. [...]

[...] He can only move, and he can only choose therefore to move, physically speaking, in certain directions in space and time. That time reference, however, gives (underlined) his free will meaning and a context in which to operate. [...]

[...] Time organizes the available choices that are to be made. The awakening mentioned earlier, then, found man rousing from his initial “dreaming condition,” faced suddenly with the need for action in a world of space and time, a world in which choices became inevitable, a world in which he must choose among probable actions—and from an infinite variety of those choose which events he would physically actualize. [...]

“By the time” that the Garden of Eden tale reached your biblical stories, the entire picture had already been seen in the light of concepts about good and evil that actually appeared, in those terms, a long time later in man’s development. [...]

(Now for two concluding paragraphs of commentary and reference: Jane’s statement that the four-fronted counterpart self persists outside of space and time implies a contradiction, of course — but this situation is one that we, as physical creatures, will in some manner always have to contend with when we encounter certain of Jane’s and Seth’s concepts [including that of the four-fronted counterpart self]. Seth’s own idea of “simultaneous time,” that “all exists at once, yet is not completed,” has run throughout his material since its inception over a decade ago. As he quite humorously commented in the 14th session for January 8, 1964: “… for you have no idea of the difficulties involved in explaining time to someone who must take time to understand the explanation.” Yet Seth’s simultaneous time isn’t an absolute, for, as he also told us in that session: “While I am not affected by time on your plane, I am affected by something resembling time on my plane … To me time can be manipulated, used at leisure and examined. To me your time is a vehicle, one of several by which I can enter your awareness. [...]

[...] A portion of you has lived many lives upon this planet, but the “you” that you know is freshly here, and will never again encounter space and time in precisely the same way. [...] The soul, or this greater personage, does not simply send out an old self in new clothes time and time again (humorously), but each time a new, freshly-minted self that then develops and goes its own way. [...]

You choose ahead of time your environment and purposes. [...] So the individuals alive upon the body of the earth at any given time fit together as beautifully as the cells do within your individual body at a particular time (most emphatically).

Give us a moment … Certain abilities can be developed with much greater ease in particular time periods — in a highly industrialized technology, for example — and those interested in that kind of an environment did not generally appear in the eras of the cavemen, simply because those alive at that time were working with different challenges. So this hypothetical greater identity also chooses to be born in different time periods, historically speaking; and the same pattern appears in which counterparts are born as individuals, each biologically and spiritually connected, but with great intertwinings and variations, as with a physical family tree.

[...] Within each dream 100 earthly years may pass —but to you the dreamer no time has passed, and there is no time to pass, for you are free of the dimension in which time exists. The time you seem to spend within the dream, within each life, is only an illusion, and to the inner self no moment has passed, and to the inner self there is no time. [...]

[...] The physical senses can only perceive reality a little bit at a time, and so it seems to you that one moment exists, and is gone forever, and the next moment comes, and like the one before it disappears. But everything in the universe exists at one time, simultaneously, and the first words ever spoken still ring throughout the universe; and in your terms, the last words ever spoken have been said time and time again, for there is no ending and no beginning. [...]

[...] I am here to tell you that I have survived physical death, and that you have survived physical death time and time again. [...]

[...] Your idea of time is false. Time as you experience it is an illusion caused by your own physical senses. [...]

[...] Each child born alters the entire universe,⁷ and changes the world of its time and birth by bringing into it action not there earlier, in your terms, and by impressing the universe with the stamp — the indelible stamp — of its reality. [...] Such dates are obviously not just points in time, pinpointed in space. In the first place, since all time is simultaneous, you are always dying and being born, and your later experience affects the time of your birth.

(Very intently:) In the same manner, the self knows ahead of time the best conditions for its own development, in light of the time and the place of its chosen birth. [...] It then preconditions its own organism to respond or not to respond to the time and place of birth, to exaggerate or minimize, to negate or accept.

[...] You are born at a certain time, at a certain place, under certain conditions — but consciousness always forms the conditions. [...] Ahead of time, you choose the seasons of your birth.

The very practice of pinpointing the time of physical birth at conception itself errs. [...] It is true that you emerge into space and time at a certain point in your perception. [...]

You block out the realization of nontime, and accept your ideas of time along with the camouflage structure, for one is dependent upon the other. Once you accept physical matter as you know it, then the time system is indispensable. In those projections still within your system, you are still bound by a time relationship, in that it seems to you that perception operates as usual.

[...] In your time system the growth of mass seems to be dependent upon continuity of moments. Time has nothing to do with form, however.

Time is useful only as a method of organizing perceptions. Perception itself does not require time. [...]

[...] All of this does not mean that personalities within other systems do not construct their own kind of time structures, but in all of these cases the personalities realize quite well that the structures are adapted for the sake of organization of experience.

[...] These CU’s therefore can operate even within time, as you understand it, in ways that are most difficult to explain. Time not only goes backward and forward, but inward and outward. I am still using your idea of time here to some degree. [...] But in the terms in which I am speaking, it is the inward and outward directions of time that give you a universe that seems to be fairly permanent, and yet is also being created.

[...] The inward and outward thrust that is not perceived is largely responsible for what you think of as ordinary consecutive time. [...] They can take any form, organize themselves in any kind of time-behavior, hyphen, and seem to form a reality that is completely dependent upon its apparent form and structure. Yet, disappearing through one of the physicists’ black holes,⁴ for example, though structure and form would seem to be annihilated and time drastically altered, there would be an emergence at the other end, where the whole “package of a universe,” having been closed in the black hole, would be reopened.

[...] The experience of forward time and the appearance of physical matter in space and time, and all the phenomenal world, results. As CU’s leave your system, time is broken down. [...]

It is vital that you understand this inward and outward thrust of “time,” however, and realize that from this flows the consecutive appearance of the moment. The thrusting gives dimensions to time that so far you have not even begun to realize. [...] All of this, once more, is tied in with your accepted neurological recognition of certain messages over others, your mental prejudice that effectively blinds you to other quite valid biological communications that are indeed present all of the “time”.

[...] Within each dream 100 earthly years may pass—but to you the dreamer no time has passed, and there is no time to pass, for you are free of the dimension in which time exists. The time you seem to spend within the dream, within each life, is only an illusion, and to the inner self no moment has passed, and to the inner self there is no time.

[...] The physical senses can only perceive reality a little bit at a time, and so it seems to you that one moment exists, and is gone forever, and the next moment comes, and like the one before it disappears. But everything in the universe exists at one time, simultaneously, and the first words ever spoken still ring throughout the universe; and in your terms the last words ever spoken have been said time and time again, for there is no ending and no beginning. [...]

[...] I am here to tell you that I have survived physical death, and that you have survived physical death time and time again. [...]

[...] Your idea of time is false. Time as you experience it is an illusion caused by your own physical senses. [...]

This provided them with a different kind of time framework psychologically—one that any peasant could relate to. The ordinary person, for example, in the western world cannot relate to a Darwinian past in that same fashion, and psychology robs him of any personal extension in the future after death, so in practical life most modern people have freedom of extension in space but less in time. The peasants of course worked closely with the land and seasons, with earth’s natural timing, and even though such work seemed to make time go faster, in the overall the sense of present time included a rich dimension from both present and past, so that in your terms it would seem longer by contrast —richer—when people went to bed earlier, lacking the night’s electricity. [...]

[...] Those who survived reacted in the old fashion, sweating to build again, refusing better shelter, but the times had indeed changed. [...] The people compared themselves to the rest of the world at times, and many of the young were beginning to leave, but those villages were, again, very like those in the times of Nebene and the Roman soldier. They had been plundered at times by wandering Roman soldiers of Rome’s empire. [...]

(Long pause.) I mention these ideas of time also now because they fit in so well with your joint personal preoccupation with time—how to use it, and so forth. (Long pause.) Nebene could also give you more on such issues if you ever find the time (amused). [...]

[...] There were many such villages in the mountains in the overall times of Nebene and your Roman soldier, and they were much in character like the villages recently destroyed in the earthquake. [...] Those Italian villages exemplified really a kind of consciousness, or an orientation of consciousness, that existed before modern psychology and Darwinian belief: a framework of consciousness and experience that was overall similar in the recent past and in the time of the Romans—one, in other words, that existed up into the present. [...]