“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Before a child has seen mountains it can dream of them. A knowledge of the planet’s environment is an unconscious portion of your heritage. You possess an unconscious environment, a given psychological world attuned to the physical one, and your learning takes place in it subjectively even as objectively you learn exterior manipulation.

The imagination is highly involved with event-forming. Children’s imaginations prevent them from being too limited by their parents’ world. Waking or dreaming, children “pretend.” In their pretending they exercise their consciousness in a particularly advantageous way. While accepting a given reality for themselves, they nevertheless reserve the right, so to speak, to experiment with other “secondary” states of being. To some extent they become what they are pretending to be, and in so doing they also increase their own knowledge and experience. Left alone, children would learn how to cope with animals by pretending to be animals, for example. Through experiencing the animals’ reactions, they would understand how to react themselves.

Children try to imagine what the world was like before they entered it. Do the same thing. The way you follow these directions can be illuminating, for the areas of activity you choose will tell you something about the unique qualities of your own consciousness. Adult games deal largely with manipulations in space, while children’s play, again, often involves variations in time. Look at a natural object, say a tree; if it is spring now, then imagine that you see it in the fall.

For another exercise, imagine that you are in another part of the world entirely, but in present time, and ask yourself the same questions. For variety, in your mind’s eye follow your own activities of the previous day. Place yourself a week ahead in time. Conduct your own variations of these exercises. What they will teach you cannot be explained, for they will provide a dimension of experience, a feeling about yourself that may make sense only to you.

There is an inner knack, allowing for greater sensitivity to the feelings of others than you presently acknowledge. That knack will be activated. Again, the powers of the brain come from the mind, so while you learn to center your consciousness in your body — and necessarily so — nevertheless your inner perceptions roam a far greater range. Before sleep, then, imagine your consciousness traveling down a road, or across the world — whatever you want. Forget your body. Do not try to leave it for this exercise. Tell yourself that you are imaginatively traveling.