“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….

(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.

Young people are urged to tackle life aggressively, but in the usage of the term this means competitively. It also implies, and of course, promotes, the direction of individual consciousness in an exterior fashion only. Not only is consciousness to be focused to the external reality, but within those limits it is still further harnessed toward certain specific goals. Other inclinations are frowned upon.

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.

(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.

Often you fall into lapses in which you actually pull in your consciousness, so to speak, and experience life in a lesser fashion. In such a state you do not seem to experience yourself directly, and indeed in the midst of what you think of as the waking state you act in the most mechanical of fashions, following habit and being less aware of sensual stimuli.

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

These beliefs obviously have another reality beside the one with which you are familiar. They attract and bring into being certain events instead of others. Therefore, they determine the entry of experienced events from an endless variety of probable ones. You seem to be at the center of your world, because for you your world begins with that point of intersection where soul and physical consciousness meet.

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.

Impulses possess a far different reality than physicists or biologists suppose. As you think now, “past” is still occurring. The “drag” still leaps the synapses, but, again, is not physically recorded. Past events continue. Consciously you only experience portions of events with your corporeal structure, yet the structure itself records them.

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.

Many such states can give you a far greater direct experience with the nature of your noncorporeal reality than any normally conscious questioning. Which you? Which world? You can to some extent discover for yourself the other probable you’s that are a portion of your being.

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.

Now give us a moment. The physical structure itself contains within it the necessary prerequisites for what you would call evolutions of consciousness — and even for, within certain limits, the organization of experience in ways that might seem quite alien to you now.

This could not happen if your physical structure did not have built-in mechanisms allowing it to, and if under certain conditions the normal intervals between the synapses of the nerve cells could not be leaped in a different fashion. In the same way, a future experience may also be physically perceived in your present. Now beneath your usual consciousness, your physical organism can react to future events without your knowledge, as it can to past ones. In such cases the intensity of the initially nonphysical event is enough to break through normal neuronal patterns.

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.