“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you feel your consciousness withdrawing, the first step is this: Forget the physical body or what you are to do with it. Will yourself out in a quick motion. There is no need to experience the hallucinations mentioned by Fox [in his book, Astral Projection]. If the projection is a success, you will instantly lose contact with the body using this method. You simply will not be in it.

It will be far from lifeless, of course. Its maintenance is being controlled by the consciousness of the individual cells and organs of which I have spoken. I will give you alternate methods of projection, but I will be concerned now with what you can expect the first few moments after leaving the body.

Ruburt’s experience with your Miss Cunningham was quite legitimate. He used a most advantageous method of projection without knowing that he did so, and I highly recommend this method to you both. When you awaken — or seem to waken — in the middle of the night, try to get out of the body. Simply try to get out of bed without moving the body and go into another room.

This is a pleasant and easy method. With some experience you will discover that you can maintain control, walk out of the apartment and outside. You may then attempt normal locomotion or levitate. There is little strain with this method. Keep it in mind so that you are alert to the initial favorable circumstances. You may be half awake. You may be in a false awakening. The method will work in either case. You can, if you want to, look back at your body.

You must want to do this, however. Often, you do not want to see the body by itself, so to speak, and so choose methods that make this more difficult. Just this one exercise will sharpen your control greatly. It is an ABC. This experience is also less startling to the ego than a more abrupt projection, and the ordinary nature of the activities — walking into the next room, for example — will be reassuring. You are more calm in your own surroundings. Of course, Ruburt was out of his body when he saw Miss Cunningham, who was in the same condition.

During this time, I was experimenting with waking projections also. The idea behind those was different: I wanted to go someplace in an out-of-body state, record my impressions of what I saw, and check the results in whatever way I could. With the dream projections, I was more intrigued by the manipulations of consciousness involved (the trick of staying between hallucinations and physical reality) and the methods. These tell far more about how consciousness works, and I was always intrigued by trying to continue normal awareness throughout dreaming.