“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:20.) First of all, these other organizations do not deal primarily with time at all, but with the emotions and associative processes. When you understand how your own associations work, then you will be in a much better position to interpret your own dreams, for example, and finally to make an art of them.

The next time you find yourself in the middle of a like experience, with associations flowing freely, then become more aware of what you are doing. Try to sense the mobility involved. You will see that the events will not necessarily be structured according to usual time, but according to emotional content.

(9:40.) The next time an opportunity arises, and you recognize the presence of a fairly strong emotion in yourself, then let your associations flow. Events and images will spring to mind in an out-of-time context. Some such remembered events will make sense to you. You will clearly see the connection between the emotion and event, but others will not be so obvious. Experience the events as clearly as you can. When you are finished, purposefully alter the sequence. Remember an event, and then follow it with the memory of one that actually came earlier. Pretend that the future one came before the past one.

When you have done this, ask yourself which scene evokes the strongest emotional response. Tell yourself that it will become larger and larger, then mentally watch its size change. Certain dynamics are involved here, so that such a scene will also attract elements from other scenes. Allow those other scenes to break up, then. The main picture will attract elements from all of the others, until you end up with an entirely different picture — one made up of many of the smaller scenes, but united in an entirely new fashion. You must do this exercise, however, for simply reading about it will not give you the experience that comes from the actual exercise. Do it many times.

Some of you will meet with some resistance in these exercises. You will enjoy reading about them, but you will find all kinds of excuses that prevent you from trying them yourself. If you are honest, many of you will sense a reluctance, for certain qualities of consciousness are brought into play that run counter to your usual conscious experience.

Many of you believe that it is safe to make a nuclear bomb, but that it is insane to use your dreams as another method of manipulating daily life; or that it is all right to be consciously aware of your viruses, wars, and disasters, but that it is not all right to be consciously aware of other portions of the self that could solve such problems.

The idea, then, is not to annihilate normal consciousness, but quite literally to expand it by bringing into its focus other levels of reality that it can indeed intrinsically perceive and utilize.

I will suggest many exercises throughout this book. Some of them will necessitate variations of normal consciousness. I may ask you to forget physical stimuli, or suggest that you amplify them, but I am nowhere stating that your mode of consciousness is wrong. It is limited, not by nature, but by your own beliefs and practice. You have not carried it far enough.

Suggest that instead of falling asleep, you will come into another kind of wakefulness. Try to imagine that you are awake when you sleep. On other occasions when you go to bed, lie down and settle yourself, but as you fall asleep imagine that you are awakening the next morning. I will not tell you what to look for. The doing of these exercises is important — not the results in usual terms.

The qualities of consciousness cannot be elucidated. These exercises will bring you in contact with other kinds of knowing, and acquaint you with different feelings of consciousness that are not familiar. Your consciousness itself will then have a different feel as the exercises are done. Certain questions that you may have asked may be answered in such a state, but not in ways that you can anticipate, nor can you necessarily translate the answers into known terms. The different modes of consciousness with which I hope to acquaint you are not alien, however. They are quite native, again, in dream states, and are always present as alternatives beneath usual awareness.

The other exercises, in fact, will result in a clearer picture of the world, for they will facilitate the very motion of your perceptions, allowing you to perceive nuances in the physical situation that before would have escaped your notice. We will be dealing with practical direct experience. It will do you no good if you are simply intellectually aware of what I say, but practically ignorant. Period. Therefore the exercises will be important because they will offer you evidence of your own greater perceptive abilities.

Continue to rely upon known channels of information, but implement these and begin to explore the unrecognized ones also available. What information do you have, for example, presently unknown to yourself? Try your hand at predicting future events. In the beginning, it does not matter whether or not your predictions are “true.” You will be stretching your consciousness into areas usually unused. Do not put any great stake in your predictions, for if you do you will be very disappointed if they do not work out, and end the entire procedure.

Only if you understand your own freedom in such areas will you allow yourselves to explore alternate states of consciousness, or the environment of dreams. Such exercises are not to be used to supersede the world you know, but to supplement it, to complete it, and to allow you to perceive its true dimensions.

He dreamed of flying, and that impetus led to the physical inventions that made mechanical flight possible. I am not speaking symbolically here, but quite literally. From the beginning, I said that the self was not confined to the body. This means that the consciousness has other methods of perceiving information, that even in physical life experience is not confined to what is sensed in usual terms. This remains fine theory, however, unless you allow yourself enough freedom to experiment with other modes of perception.