“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane described her altered state of consciousness to me while it was in progress on Monday, of course, then the next morning she wrote as complete an account of it as she could. This took over six thousand words — and even while typing she found herself reliving portions of the experience to some moderate degree….

(“As I struggled through these, my subjective state changed to such a degree that I called Rob again. I began to sense the Speakers’ ‘massive lives,’ and I realized that I had gone beyond the poem. The inspiration was now directing my perception so that as I looked around, the world was altered. When this happens to me, this state that we think of as subjective life turns real and objective, and is then viewed in the same way that our normal physical life is.

(“I felt claustrophobic for a bit … my visual perception was again altered in a strange smoother way, so that everything I saw was an inside that was inside itself, ad infinitum. I felt dwarfed. But almost immediately came the oddest feeling of fantastic security, and I realized that being inside God … we were literally made of God-stuff and were therefore eternal.

(“Each of these ideas came as emotional revelations, accompanied by various bodily sensations and alterations of visual perception. In here other experiences began, and to different degrees I did get lost in them. One involved my body becoming massive — not as if it was massive, but massive itself. To all intents and purposes I was massive, lying there. I expanded in some way, rising higher….”

(1. Seth deals with cellular memory to some extent in the 638th session in Chapter Ten; also see the 632nd and 637th sessions. Among other material covering altered states of consciousness on Jane’s part, refer to her Introduction, as well as the notes for the 639th session in Chapter Ten, and the 645th session in Chapter Eleven. By the looks of things, she’ll have more such episodes that we can add to later chapters. She plans to study all of her experiences with various stages of consciousness in her book, Aspect Psychology.

(2. There are clear connections between the “massive” portions of Jane’s latest psychic adventure and her first encounters with Seth Two in April, 1968; she goes into those experiences in some detail in Chapter Seventeen of The Seth Material. There is more on Seth Two in Chapter Twenty-two of Seth Speaks. In Chapter One of The Seth Material, she describes her first “trip” through an altered state of consciousness — and how it resulted in the production of her manuscript, The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. See the notes preceding the 633rd session in Chapter Eight.

Dictation. (Quietly:) Your attitudes toward sleep, dreams, or any alterations of consciousness are all colored to some extent then by beliefs concerning good and evil in your Western society. These emerge from the old Puritan work ethic: “The devil finds evil work for idle hands.”

This kind of thinking by itself brings about an overall attitude in which rest is frowned upon, and dreams are considered suspect. Daydreaming and even mild alterations of consciousness take on moral connotations. Such ideas are mirrored in your society in innumerable fashions, and in areas in which values of good and evil are not apparent. Active sports are considered good, however, but often contrasted to passive intuitive activities which are then seen as bad.

Such individuals are trained to consider any alterations of consciousness, any seemingly “passive” endeavor as dangerous to one degree or another. An artist will be tolerated — only if his work sells well, for example, in which case it will be thought that the artist is simply trickier than most in discovering a way of making money.

The physical constitution of the body follows your beliefs, and so all of its sense data will faithfully mirror the beliefs that direct its activity. In certain terms hypnosis is simply an exercise in the alteration of beliefs, and only too clearly shows that sense experience follows expectations.

Even the intimate body experience alters. You may say that you are you, but which you are you? In the most personal terms each individual creates his own world. The biological equipment of your creaturehood directs your mass experience enough so that agreement is reached, but only along certain general lines.

(Pause at 10:27.) The overall private experience that you perceive forms your world, period. But which world do you inhabit? For if you altered your beliefs and therefore your private sensations of reality, then that world, seemingly the only one, would also change. You do go through transformations of beliefs all the time, and your perception of the world is different. You seem to be, no longer, the person that you were. You are quite correct — you are not the person that you were, and your world has changed, and not just symbolically.

In such a way the cells retain their memory, though you do not perceive it, and the body is aware of so-called future occurrences, though as a rule you do not consciously sense this. (Suddenly very intense and fast:) At other levels of psychic activity however such knowledge is also available to you, but only when you disconnect your experience from the time-activated neuronal structure — and this you can do through various alterations of consciousness, often quite spontaneously adopted.

You can dip into cellular memory, for example. Using memory, you follow but one recognized sequence of remembered events backward. There are elements in your past that are as unpredictable, however, as the elements in your future now appear to be (emphatically). There is creativity in your past waiting for you even as there is in your future, but to utilize such experiences you must learn to alter your beliefs, and to some degree escape from the particular kind of limited conscious focus that you habitually use.

If you are aware of such a future episode, you will be forced to react to it as a conscious being. In any case your temporal structure will respond whether or not you are aware of the reasons for such behavior. The future incident may then occur in its time sequence, and you recognize it through memory, in which case your reactions in that future present will be altered because of the seemingly past memory.

In your terms that event may never come to pass, however, because it may be arising from a probable past that was once your present, but from which you have diverged. This is one of the reasons why psychics’ predictions often do not seem to bear out, for at every point you do indeed have the free will, through your beliefs, to alter your experience.