“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

You might feel as if you are crossing your wires, so to speak, or stretching vaguely sensed psychic muscles. The purpose is not so much the perfect execution of such exercises as it is to involve you in a different mode of experience and of awareness that comes into being as you perform in the ways suggested. You have been taught not to mix, say, waking and dreaming conditions, not to daydream. You have been taught to focus all of your attention clearly, ambitiously, energetically in a particular way — so daydreaming, or mixing and matching modes of consciousness, appears passive in a derogatory fashion, or nonactive, or idle. (Louder:) “The devil finds work for idle hands” — an old Christian dictum.

Unfortunately, certain aspects of Christianity were stressed over others, and that dictum was based upon the belief in a wicked self that needed to be disciplined and diverted into constructive activity. The belief in such an unsavory self stops many people from any exploration of the inner self — and, therefore, from any direct experience that will give them counter-evidence. If you are afraid of yourself, if you are afraid of your own memories, you will block your associative processes, fearing for example that they will bring to light matters best forgotten — and usually sexual matters.

Many individuals are afraid that they will be swept away by inner explorations, that insanity will overtake them, when instead the physical stance of the body and personality is firmly rooted in these alternate organizations. There is nothing wrong with the conscious mind. You have simply put a lid on it, allowing it to be only so conscious, and no more. You have said: “Here it is safe to be conscious, and here it is not.”

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.