“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.

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.

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.

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.’

It may, however, be a valid projection. The room and people exist but not in a way that you endorse as reality. They exist in another dimension, but as a rule you cannot perceive it. [To Rob:] The paintings that you will paint exist now. It is possible for you to project yourself into one of your own future landscapes. This would not be an imaginative projection. This is what I am trying to tell you.

You may find yourself, for example, in the middle of a battle that was once planned in some general’s mind, a battle that never materialized in physical reality. In such a case, incidentally, you were not a part of the battle and could not be harmed. However, you might be attracted enough to project yourself spontaneously into the body of one of the soldiers, in which case you could experience pain until your own fear pulled you back. As you learn control, such mistakes vanish.

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.

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.

Here I experienced another false awakening in which I told Rob what was going on and explained the previous episode. (Actually I’d returned to the bedroom, I believe, still in astral form, lost the necessary focus of consciousness and hallucinated.)

The sensation of intense speed was very real at the beginning of the experience, and during the entire episode I struggled to retain a critical sense which I alternately achieved and lost. The experiment was a success, in that I was convinced I’d left my body from the dream state. But what about Rob’s doubles and Miss Roohan?

“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.”

As you know, it is almost impossible for you to be aware of the full perceptions possible, for the ego would not stand for it. Often, even in simple dreams, however, you will feel concepts or understand a particular piece of information without a word being spoken. In some projections, you will also experience a concept, and, at first, you may not understand what is happening. In these, you experience as actual the innermost reality of a given concept.

I want to make this clearer, however. Suppose that you suddenly understand the concept of oneness with the universe, and that this inner sensing of concepts is to be used. You would then construct dream images, a multitudinous variety of shapes and forms meant to represent the complicated forms of life. You would then have the experience of entering each of those lives. You would not think of what it was like to be a bird. You would momentarily be one. This does involve a projection of sorts, yet still must be called by contrast a pseudo-projection. A normal projection would involve one of the three body forms.

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.