“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.

(Session 261, May 23, 1966)

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

(Excerpt from Session 262, May 25, 1966)

I want to give you some idea of the conditions you may expect to meet in any successful projections, so that you will be prepared to some extent. For simplicity’s sake, we will call the body forms discussed in our last session forms one, two and three.

Let us take an example: While asleep, you project into 1982. There you see yourself considering various courses of action. For a moment you are aware of a sense of duality as you view this older self. You communicate with this other self; and we will go into this sort of thing more deeply in another session. In any case, your future self heeds what you say. Now in the actual future you are the self who hears the voice of a past self, perhaps in a dream, or perhaps in a projection into the past.

A few days after this session I tried my first deliberate “projection nap,” as I called it. Instead of going to my typewriter at 8:00 A.M. as usual, I lay down and set the alarm for 9:30.1 gave myself the suggestion that I would go to sleep, recognize my state when I began to dream and project my consciousness out of my body. Paper and pen were on the bedside table. I also closed the doors so I would not hear the doorbell or phone.

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

Ruburt saw two of you. He saw your second form as described earlier [in Session 262]. The other was Ruburt’s dream form of you, created by himself in the dream state. When you appeared in your form two, he was conscious enough to recognize your arrival and then point out the dream image he had already created. You were able to see it also, because of your own state.

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

(Excerpts from Session 268, June 15, 1966)

Ruburt [in the dream given before this session] was in the third form, and he did project beyond your solar system. This was still a projection within the physical universe, however. He was given information that he did not remember. When you explore the inside of a concept, you act it out. You form a temporary but very vivid image production. If Ruburt’s experience had been only this, it still would have been pertinent, for when you understand a concept in such a way the knowledge is never forgotten. It becomes part of your physical cells and your electromagnetic structure.

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.