“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.

Following Seth’s instructions, I was learning to recognize when I was dreaming while I was dreaming, manipulate dream events if I wanted to, leave my body and separate halluncinations from reality.

We tried many experiments with various results, over the next three years. When I began my psychic classes, some of my students began experiments of their own. Before I give some examples from our records, here is some of the material on projection that Seth gave us during that time. It includes instructions, hints and the descriptions of the various realities in which the projectionist may find himself.

(Since Seth makes further reference to this incident, I’ll describe it briefly, though waking projections will not generally be discussed in this book which is devoted to dreams and related material. I was so reassured by Fox’s experiences that I instantly tried to project from a waking state. I lay down on the bed to support my body, closed my eyes and used all my will-power to eject myself out. Almost at once, and I must admit, much to my astonishment, I succeeded. There was a wrench, almost painful, a click at the back of my neck and I found myself flying through a window at seemingly incredible speed, out of the house at second floor level, gaining altitude and heading over Water Street toward the mountains in the distance. My head felt bursting with pressure. Fully alert and conscious, I was terrified of falling.

I realized only later that the cord or cable I’d felt was the astral cord. The experience put me off enough that for some time following I always used a light trance or dream framework for projections. Now Seth said:)

That particular experience was my most “shocking,” and I’m just as glad it happened in the beginning. Later, I always specified that I wanted to get out of my body in my room or apartment or go to another specific location. Very rarely do you go wide-awake, speeding out of your body like a rocket. Dream projections are quite different, in any case, and the ego is already protected, as mentioned by Seth.

In the meantime, Seth continued with his sessions on projection.

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.

That night, June 1, 1966, we had our 264th session, and in it, Seth made some references to my experience:

In Session 268, June 15, 1966, Seth mentioned this dream and continued his information on projection.

Some of you may call dream projections hallucinatory. Yet nothing of that kind happened to us before the Seth sessions. The instructions we were given worked. A curious new second life began, adjacent to our normal one. Some may call it a fantasy life, but surely it is no more fantastic or mysterious than the ordinary world in which we all find ourselves.

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.

Not that I’ve been cold out of my body, because I haven’t. But my flesh itself seems to slow down come December, despite all I should know from the Seth Material about the innate vitality that gives the body its life.