From Specious to Spacious

At about half past six on the evening of Monday, 6 April 1964, Jane Roberts was reading a magazine article when she came across the word specious and found she had read it as spacious. Then a phrase came to her: "spacious present". She did not feel Seth about, her husband Robert Butts noted, yet she thought the phrase significant for some reason.

The note opens the record of Session 41, held at nine that night and later collected in the first volume of The Early Sessions. It does not name the magazine or say what the article was about. All it records is one letter taken for another.

When the session began, Seth returned to the episode. Calling Jane "Ruburt", as he always did, he said Ruburt had been right: "There was a purpose in his misreading." Then he gave the slip the weight of a definition. "In actuality there is only a spacious present, so spacious that it cannot be explored all at once in your terms, hence your arbitrary division of it into larger rooms of past, present and future." Later in the session he compared those divisions to the walls of a house, which do not actually exist as such and still protect the people inside.

So far, a page of the Seth material like many others. But the word Roberts misread is not just any word to set beside "present".

A present that deceives

In 1882 Macmillan published in London The Alternative: A Study in Psychology, a book William James would cite as the work of "Mr. E. R. Clay". In a paragraph of a few lines, its author observed that the objects of experience are given as present, yet the time they refer to is not the philosophers' Present, the shared boundary of past and future. "The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past — a recent past — delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present."

His examples are plain. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present; all the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. And the verdict is blunt: "The specious present is a fiction of experience."

Specious means having the look of truth without the substance. Eight years later, in The Principles of Psychology, James took the phrase up and made it famous. The only fact of our immediate experience, he wrote, is what Clay "has well called 'the specious present.'" The practically cognized present "is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time." The specious present has been a technical term in the philosophy and psychology of time ever since.

The same mistake, from the other side

Put side by side, the two phrases say almost the same thing and its opposite. Both hold that the present we feel is not the real present. They disagree about where the error lies.

For Clay, the real present is only the boundary between a past and a future which, he says, do not exist. What we live as "now" is wider than the truth: a little past passing itself off as present. Experience holds too much present.

For Seth, it is the other way round. The real present is too vast to be explored all at once, and what we call past and future are rooms partitioned inside it. Experience holds too little present. In the same session Seth says that, from where we stand, the present appears "a fleeting, almost ashen illusion in itself". Illusion turns up in both texts; what changes is the thing accused of being illusory.

James, between them, keeps the breadth of the lived present and nearly stops treating it as a deception. For him it is the one fact of immediate experience.

What the texts do not say

It matters to be exact about what the sources will not support. Butts's note speaks of the word specious, not the phrase specious present; by his account, "present" joined it in Roberts's mind a moment later. We do not know whether she knew Clay's and James's term, or whether the article concerned time at all. In the books by Roberts and Seth that can be searched in nowdictation's public transcription, specious appears only in that note. The pairing with Clay is this piece's, not Roberts's and not Seth's.

Nor does the pairing make Seth's idea truer for resembling a philosopher's term, or Clay's less serious for sitting near a trance session. Both remain ideas about time, to be read as ideas.

A few years later, in The Seth Material (1970), Roberts came back to the question in her own voice. Perhaps the series of past, present and future is only part of a larger present, she wrote, "a more spacious 'moment' of which we are unaware". She put it as a question and left it as one.

What remains is an April evening on which a single vowel changed. Reading a word, one might add, is already one of the short spans Clay described: the letters hang together like the notes of a bar, and for a moment all of them seem present. It was inside such a span that specious became spacious. From a present that deceives by seeming wider than it is to one that deceives because we see it narrower than it is, the distance was one letter.