“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, we joined a book club that dealt with psychic phenomena. Much to my amazement, their literature listed several books on projection. We ordered Oliver Fox’s Astral Projection. Astonished, I discovered that my experiences followed his rather closely, even though most of my projections to that date had been spontaneous. I decided to do more deliberate experimentation from the dream state by napping during the day — something I hadn’t thought of earlier.

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.

The dream body is the one with which you are most familiar. It has been called the astral body. It strikes you as being physical when you are in it, but you can do things with it that can’t be done ordinarily. You can levitate, for example. As a rule, however, you do not go through walls with this body. This is the body you use for ordinary dreams. Levitation is possible with it but on a limited basis.

The third we may call the true projection form. In it, it is possible to travel beyond your solar system, and to perceive the past, present and futures of other systems as well as your own. The various forms that you use do not dictate your experience, however. You may begin in one form and change to another — or go from the first to the third. On such occasions you must pass through in reverse direction [on returning]. The forms merely represent stages of consciousness.

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.

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.

The projections here are fairly short in duration, though exceptionally clear. You may encounter phantoms from your own subconscious, however, and they will seem exceedingly real. If you realize that you are projecting, you may simply order any unpleasant phantoms to disappear, and they will do so. You may banish a nightmare also, if you realize that it is a product of your own subconscious. If you treat it as a reality, however, then you must deal with it as such until you realize its origin or return to the ordinary dream state.

There are various situations you must learn to handle, attractions and repulsions which could pull you willy-nilly in any direction. Experience will teach you how to handle these. What is needed is a steady maintenance of identity under conditions which will be new as far as your conscious awareness is concerned. I cannot emphasize too strongly that projections into other dimensions do occur. Many such instances are often considered chaotic dreams because there is no way to check them against physical events since they did not occur in physical terms.

Now, when Ruburt dreams that he has discussed a dream with you, in most cases he has done so. You both converse quite naturally in forms number two. With enough traveling, these conversations can be recorded in both of your dreams. The amount of work to be done here is astounding, but you can both do this, and in so doing, you can increase man’s knowledge of the potentials of the dream state.

You will be able to look back and see your physical body upon the bed on some occasions, and in other cases you will not be able to do this. In the first body form, for example, you can look back and see the physical body. If you project from this form into the next, in order to intensify the experience, then from this second form you will not see the physical one. You will be aware of it, and you may experience some duality. In the third form, you will no longer be aware of the physical body, and you will not see it.

In the third form, your experiences will be most vivid. They may involve you in other systems beside your own, and you will have little contact with the physical environment. For this reason, projections in the third form are the most difficult to maintain. There are dangers that do not exist when the other two forms are used.

I want to mention the difference in experience and sensation between projections from a dream state and those from the trance state and also what Ruburt calls awake-seeming dreams, for there are many things here that you do not know, and they are fairly important.

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.