“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.

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.

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:)

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.

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.

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.

If so, I should be able to project. So I got out of bed and went into the bathroom where I sat on a chair to think things over. Again, everything seemed the way it should be, though the room did look exceptionally sharp, the details in brilliant focus. Could I be out of my body already, I wondered? If so, I should be able to levitate in this body which seemed physical enough to me. Feeling rather foolish, I willed to levitate.

Then I fell into a brief period of unconsciousness. I came to to find myself back in the garden I had seen earlier. A woman beckoned to me. I recognized her instantly as Miss Lizzie Roohan, a neighbor of ours years ago, who had been dead for at least fifteen years. Remembering her death, I was quite surprised to see her and even more intrigued by her appearance. Although she had been in her eighties when she died and in her sixties when I first knew her, she looked like a woman in her middle thirties. We carried on a conversation that I did not remember later. I fell into a normal dream which was also forgotten before the alarm awakened me.

“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.”