“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

From 1963 until 1966, Rob and I worked alone, holding the twice-weekly sessions and following Seth’s instructions. I had several spontaneous out-of-body experiences during Seth sessions and while doing the exercise Seth calls psy-time. These checked out in physical reality and are recorded in my book, The Seth Material. Some of these episodes concerned strangers who had written to me. In out-of-body states, I correctly described distant environments giving specific, checkable information. Such instances did much to convince me that projections were not just imaginative dramatizations.

In the meantime, the dream-recall experiments led first to spontaneous projections from the dream state, and then to deliberate experimentation. Rob and I were unacquainted with the information on projection to be found in esoteric literature. I was incredulous at the instructions and information given by Seth, yet I’d already had enough experience to know that Seth’s “theoretical material” worked. As we followed it, our own results brought the material itself to life.

But often, after doing all this, I would simply fall back to sleep again, dream normally until morning, and lose the clear memory of my experiences. I reasoned that if I just napped for an hour or so in the day, then I’d be less apt to forget. It became a great joke between Rob and myself, this “laying down on the job” or going to sleep in order to go to work. To some extent, it also upset my ordinary sleep schedule, so I usually experimented in this way for only a few weeks at a time.

Here, as I told Rob later, the “brave experimenter” quite simply panicked. I was scared stiff; I’d bitten off quite a bit more than I could chew. At the moment I panicked, I was suddenly pulled backward through the air faster than I’d come, if that was possible. This frightened me more than the forward flight. This time, there was a strange, very loud noise, like the magnified twang of a rubber band or cable that seemed to be reeling me back in. I actually hit my physical body with a shock, my physical head and neck banging up and down on the pillow, so that my shoulders and neck were stiff for a week.

Everything was very new to us then, though. I was more than satisfied with the experience, scare or no; and Rob was envious, telling me that he wouldn’t have panicked under the same conditions. As it happened, he spoke too soon.

One weekend afternoon, Rob was napping, and I was doing the dishes. He fell asleep and “awakened” to find himself hovering about three feet out in the air outside his studio window, between the house and the large pear tree that shades the room. For a moment he just couldn’t understand what was happening. He knew that physically such a position was impossible, and he held his breath, waiting for the inevitable fall.

But nothing happened. He just hung there. Suddenly he realized that he was out of his body and didn’t know what to do next. He yelled out for me, but I was in my physical body, humming merrily out in the kitchen, and I never heard a thing. Desperately, Rob wished for some support, and quite spontaneously he created a child’s scooter that appeared beneath him. He could see the yard and garage clearly but the image of a grown-up man on a scooter up two stories from the ground was just too much — he snapped back to his body.

It may, however, be a valid projection. The room and people exist but not in a way that you endorse as reality. They exist in another dimension, but as a rule you cannot perceive it. [To Rob:] The paintings that you will paint exist now. It is possible for you to project yourself into one of your own future landscapes. This would not be an imaginative projection. This is what I am trying to tell you.

I fell asleep at once. The next thing I knew I seemed to be in a lovely garden that I had planted myself in some undisclosed past. Then I thought that I was wide awake, telling Rob about the dream. As I chatted with him, a nagging doubt bothered me. Was I really awake, or was this a “false awakening as described by both Seth and Fox, and which I had experienced in the past? I looked about the bedroom. Everything seemed perfectly normal. It was difficult to imagine that I might really be asleep and dreaming, and not awake. Yet I’d gone to bed to experiment, I knew, and to make sure I decided to take it for granted that I really was dreaming, despite the semblance of normality.

Here I experienced another false awakening in which I told Rob what was going on and explained the previous episode. (Actually I’d returned to the bedroom, I believe, still in astral form, lost the necessary focus of consciousness and hallucinated.)

I left the room almost at once and appeared in a house supposedly owned by friends, Jack and Lydia. This was not their normal house in daily life, though, and I was aware of this. Here I stood talking to Rob again, quite forgetting that he was at work. As I spoke to him, I turned my head and saw another Rob, a perfect double, standing in a room directly across the corridor. Amazed, I told Rob to stand where he was, while I moved closer to the door to check my observations.

“Look, Rob. Come here,” I said, and Rob came to the doorway where he saw his own double clearly. They stared at each other, the double looking as amazed as Rob was.

The sensation of intense speed was very real at the beginning of the experience, and during the entire episode I struggled to retain a critical sense which I alternately achieved and lost. The experiment was a success, in that I was convinced I’d left my body from the dream state. But what about Rob’s doubles and Miss Roohan?

Ruburt’s projection from the dream state was legitimate, though his control was poor. The plants Ruburt saw represented the books upon which he has worked and is working. The Lydia episode contained many ordinary dream elements. [To Rob:] You were indeed present with Ruburt in some of his travels, but you have forgotten.

So at least twice a week I lay down to experiment, my body on the couch or bed, the alarm clock set, my house in order, while I try to “get out” to see what I could find. I seem to have a curious talent for this, and rarely do I fail to leave my body when I’ve really made up my mind to go. Yet for periods at a time, I just concentrate on the Seth sessions, with Seth on the one side of reality and Rob on the other — two good guardians. Then I avoid out-of-body experiments. A sense of strangeness seems connected with them then. My consciousness, so used to my flesh, says that I’ve had enough. And I’m afraid to leave my body in the wintertime. In black and white print, this sounds ridiculous, yet, emotionally, the statement has a logic that speaks louder than all my deliberate suggestions to the contrary. So I experiment between May and November, coming in for the winter when the wild skies of fall are over and the bone-chilling cold settles in.