“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

By then, of course, Rob and I felt a strong commitment to the sessions. Now we feel that we have a twice-weekly appointment with the universe, and certainly this attitude developed during those projection sessions when we tried during the day to follow the instructions given by Seth. Sessions were held in the bedroom then. Now we hold them in Rob’s back studio. Both rooms are to the rear of the apartment and more private than the living room. So even space-wise, there seems to be a connection between those earlier sessions and the present ones in which Seth is dictating his own book.

The experience of “coming to life during dreams” with any consistency, having some critical awareness, some rational control, some glimpse of other-dimensional reality — these events in the overall are bound to transform ordinary concepts regarding the nature of consciousness.

It may, instead, be a rushing upward. Whichever motion you experience, there will be a moment when you feel your identity and consciousness definitely withdrawing from the physical organism. Before you begin the experiment, the suggestion should also be given that the physical organism will be well protected and comfortable.

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.

I have been speaking of projection from the trance state. Projection from a dream is something else again, and when executed successfully, you have a fine example of the self as it changes the focus of awareness. Here the critical consciousness can be fully alert while the body sleeps. Spontaneous, unrecalled projections of this kind happen often. It is beneficial that they be carried out by the conscious wish of the projector. You learn, therefore, to manipulate your own consciousness and to experience its mobility. Quite simply, such projections allow you practice in dealing with realities that you will meet when you no longer operate in the physical system.

All through this period I was trying to train myself to come “awake” while asleep. It serves no purpose to include all of the many dreams of this nature that I recorded — dreams in which I managed to regain my critical senses, sometimes only to fall back into normal dreaming and sometimes to embark upon conscious experiments. But one experience in particular was very vivid and informative. Excerpts from the following session will show you what I was trying to do.

When this occurs, you will be able to use your normal abilities in addition to those of the dream condition. You will be certain of your identity, realize that the physical self is sleeping or in a dream state and that the inner self is fully awake. This represents a definite increase in the scope of consciousness and a considerable expansion over the usual limitations set by you upon yourself.

Then the suspicion struck me that perhaps this was an awake-seeming dream, that I was still dreaming and that none of the dreams had been written down at all. I kept struggling to analyze my state of consciousness and finally decided to check the notebook again.

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.

As I mentioned in The Seth Material, my waking projections and the spontaneous ones in the Seth trance yielded enough evidence to convince us that I was legitimately out of my body and perceiving another location — and not just out of my mind. It is far more difficult to get objective proof for dream projections, yet the subjective proof is quite definite. The task of trying to maintain specific states of consciousness is enough work and effort to convince anyone having the experience that far more than simple dreaming or imagination is involved.

Just lately the same sort of thing happened. Sometime during the night I “awakened” to find myself standing in a bathroom. In this brief but clear moment of critical consciousness, I saw a linen cabinet, open. On the shelf directly in front of me was a stack of towels, all more or less the same size, as if they were of a set. I could see only the front edges, of course, except for the top. They were blue-purple, and the top one had a flower in the center. I could see what was in front of me clearly, but something blocked my vision to the right. I tried to observe what I could, quickly. At first, nothing told me whose house this was, so I asked mentally, and got the words, “Tom’s, one of your students.”

On another occasion, I gave myself suggestions that during the night, I would project to Peg and Bill Gallagher’s house. When morning came, I remembered nothing except that I had tried to get there, drifted off in the general area, then lost proper control of my consciousness. A few days later Peg called me with a strange story. A newspaper man, a colleague of hers, told Peg that, though he didn’t know me at all, he awakened in the middle of the night convinced that I was in his room. My name kept coming to him over and over, and he sensed my presence. The man has no interest in psychic matters, and told Peg because he knew she was a friend of mine. His experience happened the same night that I tried to get to Gallaghers — and he lives in the same area.

These chemical excesses are a natural by-product of consciousness that is bound up in physical materialization. The more intense the characteristic experience of reality, the greater the chemical excess that is built up. Consciousness itself, when physically oriented, burns up the chemicals. The more intense the individual, the hotter the fire, so to speak, and the greater the chemical excesses released.

Projections involve many more aspects of the whole self and are a mark that the personality is progressing in important ways. The inner senses are allowed their greatest freedom in projection states, and the self retains experience that it would not otherwise. When this knowledge becomes a part of the ordinary waking consciousness, then you have taken a gigantic step forward.

An almost automatic determination must be established, however, if conscious projections are to be anything but rare oddities. With the both of you, the problem is somewhat different than it might be with some others. These chemical excesses are used up, for one things, in your own creative work. You do this automatically. It goes without saying that your own work will gain immeasurably through the extended experience of projection. The yoga exercises allow you to draw an abundance — indeed, a super-abundance — of energy. This energy results, also, in chemical excesses that can be utilized in projections, without drawing energy away from your other work.

Projections actually involve a change of atomic structure. Consciousness simply changes its form. When projection is first accomplished, there is a strong charge of adrenaline in the body and high activity of the thyroid gland. There is a charge of sexual hormones which are also utilized in projection.

According to the intensity of the projection and to the systems visited, the body may become more or less rigid when consciousness returns to it. This is simply a reaction to the returning consciousness. There is a subtle difference in the way sugar molecules are utilized. Momentarily, the body uses less sugar. However, the sugar is important in fueling the consciousness on its journey. It also aids in connecting the consciousness to the body.

In other words, there is indeed a connection that is and must be partially physical, between the body and the traveling consciousness, and it is based upon a certain sugar molecule in a form not normally seen. Before conscious projections I would therefore recommend that you take a small amount of starchy or sugar food. A small snack before bed is a good idea from this viewpoint. Alcohol is of some benefit, though not to any great degree. Excellent results can be achieved in a dream-based projection during the day, in a nap.