Monday, March 25, 2013

Working toward a validation of Seth's "inner senses"

I've read most of the Seth books multiple times over many years, and I always have the disconcerting experience of reading each book again as if I've read it for the first time... The books hold a different focus, depending on the stage of life that I happen to be at.

Now is no different.  What stands out for me now in my re-current reading of "The Early Sessions" (and the "official" corresponding book, "Seth Speaks") is the persistent emphasis on the "inner senses." It seems to be the core theme of both books, and Seth repeatedly drives home the importance of using our "inner senses."  Previously, I've glossed over these discussions... I considered them too esoteric, too remote from any practical experience, but I now believe that Seth's descriptions can finally be validated, fifty years after their first transcription, by contemporary NDE accounts.


A full discussion of what Seth means by the "inner senses" is well beyond the scope of this blog... but to summarize what I think Seth means, "inner senses" are those perceptive mechanisms that are associated with our whole self--both the part that is physically incarnated (the subconscious), as well as those aspects of our greater self that reside outside our physical system.  Our physical senses mimic to some extent the functions of the inner senses, but they are narrowly focussed on observing (or, more correctly, building a representation of) the physical world.  (A good summary of Seth's treatment of the inner senses can be found here.)

My primary interest in the subject is in validation--is there any evidence in existing reports, outside of the Seth books, that documents the use of these senses?

I think that there is, at least concerning the "first" inner sense, referred to as "inner vibrational touch" (which is a woefully inadequate description of the actual experience). Those who have had vivid OOBEs likely are quite familiar with this sense; Seth describes it as such:

I will go into it more deeply but you may call it the first inner sense.  It involves immediate perception of a direct nature, whose intensity varies according to what is being sensed. It involves instant cognition through what I can only describe as inner vibrational touch. This is, if you will excuse the pun, touchy, since I want to avoid any implication here of sloppy sentimental emotionalism; and the word vibrational is not the best. This sense would permit our man to feel the basic sensations felt by the tree, so that instead of looking at the tree his consciousness would expand to contain the experience of what it is like to be a tree. According to his proficiency, in a like manner he would feel the experience of being the intervening grass and so forth.  He would in no way lose consciousness of who he was, and he would perceive these experiences, again, somewhat in the same manner that you perceive heat and cold. In your camouflage pattern you must adapt yourself to the effects of heat and cold, but our man in the inner world would not be under any such obligation. I am speaking now only of our first inner sense.


By this first inner sense, the comatose patient undergoing a near-death experience is able to "see" the operating room theater, the instruments that the physicians are using, perceive the thoughts of the nurses, sense the fear of relatives gathered outside, and look beyond walls and doors of the room and see not only the physical environment in intricate detail, but also the underlying "astral" environment (lights, music, vivid landscapes) that coexists with the physical.

Such is, in fact, what Anita Moorjani describes in "Dying To Be Me":

In this near-death state, I was more acutely aware of all that was going on around me than I’ve ever been in a normal physical state. I wasn’t using my “five biological senses," yet I was keenly taking everything in, much more so than if I’d been using my physical organs. It was as though another, completely different type of perception kicked in, and more than just perceive, I seemed to also encompass everything that was happening, as though I was slowly merging with it all. * ** As my emotions were being drawn away from my surroundings, I started to notice how I was continuing to expand to fill every space, until there was no separation between me and everything else. I encompassed—no, became—everything and everyone.


I would like to explore further this first "inner sense" but for now, I am willing to go out on a limb and argue the following:  If Ms. Moorjani's account is correct (and I can't find any reason to assume that it isn't), she describes the operation of the first "inner sense," fifty years after it was first explained by Jane Roberts--before NDEs were part of the cultural landscape. While it's not impossible that Jane Roberts "free-associated" her way through a detailed description of an esoteric experience that would not be explicable until years later, I'd rather think that she didn't.  Seth's description of a sense that he clumsily calls "inner vibrational touch" is simply too strange, too obscure to have any contemporary meaning then; but it does now, to students of NDE accounts.  

7 comments:

  1. Good heavens. One needn't bang himself on the head with a hammer to experience his own senses, inner OR outer. The inner ones are in operation constantly. Without 'em you wouldn't be perceiving physical reality at all. They're the canvas upon which the outer senses paint pictures of physical reality.

    It's just that, in all honesty, some people are more comfortable with the truth of it than others. Get used to the truth of it, you'll see a lot more. Stay uncomfortable about it -- a guilty sense of morality has a lot to do with it -- and you'll always stay "scientific," waiting for somebody to catch some in a leyden jar...

    ...and then have POWERS BEYOND IMAGINING! AAAAH HA HA HA HA HAAAAAA! Be the life of the party! Get ALL the girls! And a swell new job with great pay!

    I've peppered my blog with a few dream-tales. Dreams are ALL inner senses.

    http://tommydark.blogspot.no/2012/03/dreaming-my-way-to-roger-ebert.html

    http://tommydark.blogspot.no/2013/06/the-disappearance-of-dreaming-daisy-mae.html

    http://tommydark.blogspot.no/2011/01/dreaming-my-way-through-inception.html

    http://tommydark.blogspot.no/2006/08/one-little-two-little-three-little.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. (Note to self: stop posting to Blogger from my iPad. It messes up the font and makes me look stupid.)

      Thank you for your comments! Very enlightening! Tomorrow night I will definitely visit your blog and comment.

      When I read the Seth books many moons ago, the material on the "inner senses" zipped right past me. It did not resonate. I now realize that Seth probably could have chosen a better term. It took many years of experience and exposure to true anomalous accounts (NDEs, OOBEs, remote viewing) to realize that we could actually experience these heightened states of perception; in fact, we often do, in transcendent experiences. What is remarkable is that Seth's description of these senses are from the 1960s, when public knowledge of NDEs was nonexistent, and much of the literature regarding OOBEs was out-of-print and forgotten. Not to mention--there was also no such thing as "remote viewing" in the '60s. Having absorbed this esoteric material for some time and integrated it into my world view, I can now agree with Seth's prediction in the first book of the "Early Sessions": "...the species to which you have the honor of belonging is now moving in
      the direction of breakthrough
      discoveries, as far as inner reality is concerned. There is much more to be said here, and you can count on me to say it."

      So does this have an impact on my day-to-day drudge world? I think so. By becoming conscious of the so-called "inner senses," you can actually learn to use them, and, ultimate, to rely upon them. This I have tried to do. In fact, arguably, I am still here because of them. Strangely enough, when I was a troubled child growing up in an alcoholic household, something inside me "knew" that these senses were present and that I could use them. It was innate knowledge; something that I was born knowing. And I tried to rely on these senses for survival. I carried a flicker of that knowledge through adolescence into adulthood, and the Seth material revived that memory.

      Delete
  2. Welp. As I said, you wouldn't be here without 'em.

    Another thing Seth sed that went right by me was his repeating that we don't recognize these things because "we're so fascinated with physical reality."

    God damn, I'd spent so much time bored out of my gourd in life I couldn't imagine he was in touch with how things were on this planet at all, to say we're "fascinated" with... this... you know... school, job, mom, home, apple pie.

    I'm only lately beginning to realize that's the best word he could come up with, "fascinated." I can't think of a better one than that. Yup. As bored as we can get, we're STILL so fascinated with physical sensation that we'll put up with that and so block out the unbelievably immense other stuff there is to perceive. It's that we all think we are too busy to perceive it.

    Rob Butts' niece was in the "remote viewing" program for Lockheed, he told me. She said they abandoned it because they never could get it to work the way they wanted. She also told him the gov't has been monitoring him and Jane and the Seth stuff all along. "I can't tell you how that made me feel," he said.

    One of my clients is a gov't hush-hush guy. He said the "remote viewing" pool in the Pentagon was also abandoned because the participants were going crazy.

    That stuff, however, is all an ordinary part of nightly dreaming. Been there. Am there. When you try to "extract" those abilities for something as stupid as clobbering your enemies to death, there's nothing you CAN do but go crazy.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is absolutely fascinating information; and now that I finally got the font right on this post (by stripping out the extraneous .html code that Blogger seems to think I want), I'm no longer embarrassed to visit this entry. (BTW.. Mr. Blogger is saying that my reply exceeds 4,096 characters, so I'll have to divide it.)

    Many of the books on the subjects of "clairvoyance," NDEs, OOBEs, "ghosts" and whatnot, approach these experiences from a solidly materialistic perspective. You have the percipient experiencing all these various confused phenomena, then scribbling down excited descriptions that can be basically boiled down to: "This is extremely strange; mere words can't describe it." A cottage industry has sprung up over these writings. Paranormal "investigators" pick through these accounts, decide that they have found a core truth or two, and appear on "Coast To Coast" to hawk their books and their pet theories. But all they are doing is trying to assemble a materialistic explanation based on fragments of incompletely perceived phenomena that may have no relationship.

    Seth's description of the "inner senses" is a completely different approach. Seth is describing how reality is perceived, from "his" perspective, and then translating this into language that our material brains can interpret. I now realize that when I have a detailed dream of an event that will take place in several months (or several years); when my dead relatives visit (in dreams or in the near-dream state) and give me information non-verbally; when I know what someone else is thinking as it is being thought; when I somehow "know" how to fix a complex computer problem in which I've had no prior experience; when I can "feel" the textures of physical matter in the OOB state; when I instantly "feel" someone else's extreme emotional state--I'm not using different extra-sensory abilities: I'm experiencing reality from a unified, non-material perspective. The inner senses are really just different aspects of the same non-physical being. I begin to understand what Seth means when he says that there are no closed systems, and our divisions are arbitrary and artificial.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm not there yet... I'm nowhere near "there," and I doubt that I will be in this lifetime, but Seth's description of the "inner senses" really does begin to impose a sort of order to the chaos and confusion that we normally experience when we attempt to perceive non-material reality. It "makes sense." Nothing else I've read--in all the metaphysical, religious, or speculative books--does a better job of tying together these disparate experiences into anything comprehensible.

      Now... does this crumb of insight qualify me to "teach" Seth? In no way. I realize that what I've achieved in thirty years of Seth studies is insight that is applicable only to me, based on my unique interests. Someone else devoting the same time and effort will walk away with a different "lesson." And that person's insight may have no meaning to me.

      You make two very important observations about the "remote viewing" programs. One: it was abandoned by Lockheed because it did not "work the way they wanted." One thing I've noticed, over and over, is that so-called "psychic abilities" can't be made to perform on command. They are spontaneous. That's why Uri Geller resorts to stage tricks. The conscious ego can't dictate to the inner self how and what to perceive. This is just a working hypothesis that can explain why most "psychics" can't predict the future (when they've been able to in the "past").

      Two: that the participants of the Pentagon's project were "going crazy" because use of remote viewing. This is extremely interesting... because I've seen, up close, mental illness that has resulted from a too-close exposure to the non-material. (It's practically epidemic among UFO experiencers.) I'm not sure that this means. I can't think of anything that can explain it, but I know it happens.

      I did like Sue Watkins' books. I have the paper versions; haven't sprung for the ebooks. However, based on your account, I am glad that I do not know her. I'll have to go back and read what Seth said about her. I remember her writing that she squandered her Seth-time by pestering him with trivial questions about boyfriends and whatnot, when she could have asked him truly meaningful questions about universal mysteries. She squandered that opportunity, but I'm happy to know that she realizes (somewhat) how fortunate she was to have had it.

      Delete
  4. Half the "trick" is to recognize that you and everybody else is already "there," that is, clairvoyantly, clairaudiently, clairfeelantly, clairsniffleantly, clairfartently, whatever sense you imagine, it stems from a very large counterpart source of which you're already conscious and never haven't been. It's YOU. Just plain old ordinary scratch your butt you, large or small. You just block out the "big" stuff and unnecessarily stay in the habit. It's an awful lot of input sometimes, can't be blamed.

    Point is, you're already "there." Everybody is. All the time. Go with that assumption and pay attention to what you're thinking throughout the day. You'll start seeing connections and they'll lead you out of the thicket of non-comprehension we've all been overtrained to accept. Another thing Seth keeps saying is that we've robbed ourselves. We certainly have. You're robbing yourself with your assessment now. Not "high enough" to sense what somebody else is feeling, or that somebody's going to call, and so on? What is it?

    Write down your dreams and go over them periodically. I'm telling you, that's where the action is, unfetterd. That's where it's so plain that you're "there" you'll wonder why you and everybody else have been such obedient blockheads all this time. Not that I've dreamed the lottery numbers. But that becomes insignificant in comparison. Tellin' ya again.

    There's no danger in "focusing on the nonmaterial." If you believe that, you'd better stick to the kiddie pool, because you may make it dangerous just to keep believing such truck.

    I should've said, about the Pentagon poolers, that using what you've finally come to realize is a natural ability simply to locate total strangers so people can then kill them will drive them crazy. Increased and practiced use of those natural senses does bring certain information about your reality to the foreground, and you do begin to see that people considered heroes and great leaders are fucking well stark, raving mad and so are their cheering audiences.

    Not that you then become some floppy kind of Jesus on Quaaludes. On the contrary.

    ReplyDelete