“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We were visited over the weekend by Robert Monroe and his wife, Nancy; they live on a farm in central Virginia. Bob Monroe is the author of Journeys Out of the Body,¹ the book that Jane and I regard as the premier work on the subject. Among many things, he wanted to tell Jane about the research complex, tentatively called The Mentronics Institute — or System — that he’s building on his farm. It will be used “by just a bunch of guys” to study various phases of psychic activity. These “guys” then will be doctors, parapsychologists, psychiatrists, and members of other scientific disciplines.

(“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….”

(“In a process impossible to describe, another change took place. This time I was a dinosaur. I mean, I WAS one. I stood on two legs, making loud, hoarse and guttural noises of … exultation as I stood upon a great plain. There was a similarity between the eagle and the dinosaur in that body armor or whatever, that strange toughness … these were all stages that I had been through — or at least that some of the cells in my body remembered — but the immediacy was very vivid on my part….

(No session was held Monday evening. Instead Jane used her “own” abilities to tune in on the diagram of a machine that Bob Monroe drew; he had seen this on one of his out-of-body journeys. Questions involving physics arose — the Fermi gap [having to do with the movement of certain electrons], and so forth — and Jane ended up drawing diagrams of her own. She enjoys using her abilities this way.

(A long pause at 10:06.) The brain can be called simply the physical counterpart of the mind. By means of the brain the functions of the soul and intellect are connected with the body. Through the characteristics of the brain, events that are of nonphysical origin become physically valid. There is a definite filtering and focusing effect at work, then. Practically speaking, you do indeed form the appearance that reality takes through your conscious beliefs. Those beliefs are used as screening and directing agents, separating certain nonphysical probable events from others, and bringing them into three-dimensional actuality.

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.

On such occasions your beliefs usually lose their edge, the directions you give to your body are not clear, and the world seems fuzzy. This is often a time of deep unconscious activity, when new latent probable characteristics are biding their time, so to speak, waiting for emergence.

In your terms probable events are brought into actuality by utilizing the body’s nerve structure through certain intensities of will or conscious belief.

In surface terms the sense of “I” that you possess is the result of constantly emerging probable identities, given continuity in time through the physical apparatus of the body with its built-in intervals of nerve reaction. You only remember the portion of your identity that is physically realized — those portions that are drawn into corporeal pattern. (With gestures, and forcefully.) This is the result of the focusing and yet limiting behavior of the physical brain, for effective survival behavior in your reality depends upon time reactions. The nerve patterns’ activity therefore causes the illusion of a present, in which your consciousness appears focused and alert.

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.