“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

For all practical purposes, of course, you will usually find yourself in some sort of body form in your out-of-body experiences. These are a necessary camouflage, for you cannot yet think of identity without some kind of body, so you project in such a form. It varies according to your abilities, and without it, you would feel lost indeed. The form itself is not important, but it can tell you something about the dimension in which you are having the experience.

When you enter a different dimension, the abilities of the body form change, and for all intents and purposes, it is a different body form — which we will now call a mind form. It still seems physical in shape, but you can walk through physical matter with it. You can levitate much more freely, traveling within the solar system. But you cannot go further with it.

(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.

But the reality of all of these constructions will be equally vivid, you see, for they are, indeed, equally real. I will give you a simple example. You may find yourself in a room with certain people. Later, upon awakening, you realize that both the people and setting belong to a particular sequence in a novel. You think then: ‘This was no projection, then, but only a dream.’

During this period, of course, we were recording all the dreams we could capture. Usually at least one of mine per night dealt with flying or levitation. During a series of dreams I seemed to be working to perfect my “flying technique,” and was taking lessons from others. Then, in the middle of several dreams such as this, I dreamed the following, according to my notes:

“The whole dream was in images. I saw the universe or whole reality, an infinity of spirals and stars, in multi-dimensional depth. Someone told me that most of our cherished ideas about the nature of reality were completely wrong. This was a revelation-type dream, but I couldn’t remember much of it at all upon awakening. Someone was guiding me, I believe.”

You remember that I listed briefly the three forms used during projections. In the first form, you usually use certain inner senses. In the second form, you use more of these, and in the third form you attempt to use all of them, though very rarely is this successful. You should notice the overall form of perception that you seem to be using. You automatically shield yourselves from stimuli that are too strong for your own rate of development. This kind of balancing can lead to an unevenness of experience, however, in any given projection.

Using the third form, there could be a tendency for you not to recognize your own physical situation. It would be difficult to carry the memories of the present ego personality with you. This third form is the vehicle of the inner self. The disorientation that it feels is the same that it will feel when the physical body is deserted at the point of death. This disorientation is only temporary, and when at death the form is severed from the physical body, then all the memories and identity within the electromagnetic structure become part of the inner self. This form is sometimes used for purposes of instruction, however, or to acquaint the whole personality with the circumstances that strongly affect it.

Most of your projections will be in the first and second form, in any case. Usually you will project from the physical body into the first form and then, perhaps, into the second. Occasionally, this will happen and you will not know it, despite all your attempts to ascertain your circumstances.

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.