“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I do not always take what is said at face value. Telegraph messages alone mean something different than the data presented, the dots and dashes that are only symbols for the information they contain. To make sense to us as physical creatures, any “truth” must undergo transformations, be couched in certain terms or we couldn’t understand it. Distortion may be part of the message — or even the medium through which it must come.

It may be that the frog could have learned more by exploring his own frogness, and, certainly, I felt rather superior to the frog and the nature of his search — that’s implied in the poem. Now it seems to me that any lively exploration into reality should lead to exuberence and greater understanding, not sadness and alienation. And I don’t believe that our world, like the watch, is simply a discard from another greater reality, though certainly it is a part of one.

The frog did not learn to tell time from his watch, though, and it’s difficult to see how this would have helped him if he had. The Seth Material, on the other hand, is more like a map, vitalized through Seth’s personality, and as we follow it, we do become aware of other realities that had been unknown to us earlier.

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.

And it is always strange to realize that physical reality has that little hold, comparatively speaking, that you can slip out of it so easily, that it is more like bright transparent cellophane than solid wood or rock. You can go in and out of it, through it and back, without leaving a tear. Yet the world is so smooth and unseamed when you’re in the body and focused there.

Whatever information I can give you will be of great practical benefit. I do not want either of you traveling about unless you know what you are doing. Again I want to mention the matter of subconscious fabrications. Initially, particularly, you will meet with them. You must remember that you are wandering in completely different dimensions, and the rules with which you are familiar simply do not apply.

I have told you that the form in which you are traveling can be a tipoff to you. If your levitation experience seems to carry you outside of the solar system, then you know that you are in the third form and that your abilities for the time are almost limitless, comparatively speaking. Any image you see here must be accepted. It does no good to call these forms hallucinations, for they are no more hallucinations than the chair in which my friend Ruburt now sits. Ruburt told one of your friends to respect physical reality. ‘Whether or not the automobile is a sensory hallucination, it can kill you,’ he said. And I tell you that whether or not these projection images are hallucinations, they can be dangerous and you must respect the reality in which they exist. I want to be sure that you realize that some of these constructions will belong to other systems. You are safe as long as you do not meddle. You may explore, and freely, and that is all.

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.

Once you are out of the body, then you are dealing with a different kind of reality, but the experience is as valid as any other. You may or may not have the sensation of traveling through doors or windows. This is dependent upon the kind of projection involved. The molecular structure of the projecting self is of a different nature than that of the physical body. There is no change in the physical nature of the door, for example. The molecular structure of the traveling self changes.

Remember that I told you you may visit not only the past, present or future as it exists or will exist in your terms, but you may also visit realities that never existed physically. In our early sessions, I mentioned that intensity regulated the ‘duration’ of experience. Now, many events that were only imagined never took place physically, yet they exist. They simply are not a part of your definition of reality. You may, therefore, visit a museum that was planned in the sixteenth century but never built. Such a museum has a reality as valid as the house in which you live.

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.

In awake-seeming dreams you are indeed awake, but within a different psychological framework, indeed, within a different framework of reality. You are operating at a high level of awareness, and using the inner senses. These enable you to perceive an added depth of dimension which is responsible for the vividness and sense of exhilaration that often occurs within the kind of dream. The next step, of course, is to allow the ego to awaken its critical faculties while within this state. You are then able to realize that while you are indeed awake as you seem, you are awake while the body is asleep.

The projected form does make some impression upon the physical system. It is possible for it to be detected. It is a kind of pseudo-image, materialistically speaking, but it has definite electromagnetic reality and chemical properties. Animals have sensed such apparitions. They react to the chemical properties and build up to the [perception of] the image from these.

These chemical properties are more diffused in such an apparition than in a physical form, however. The chemical composition of a storm, perhaps, will give you an idea of what I mean. … They cause small disturbances in the physical system. As a rule, they are not solid, in the same way that clouds are not solid, and yet they have shape and to a certain extent, boundaries and movement. They definitely have a reality, though you cannot usually perceive it with the physical senses.

The next thing I knew, I was out in the living room having some difficulty standing on the floor, but bumping up and down a few feet above the rug. This, in itself, should have told me that I was out of my body, but the realization didn’t come. As I stood there, trying to figure out what was going on, I heard someone at the door. In came Miss Cunningham, wearing a nightgown and robe. She was mumbling and crying to herself, confused and disoriented. “Mrs. Butts? Mrs. Butts?” she kept saying, exactly as she used to when she came to me for help.

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.

And some of these dream projections did yield evidence that was convincing to me. One night while experimenting in the dream state, for example, I found myself standing in a room about the size of our bedroom, but it was obviously being used as a closet. A single bulb hung from the ceiling. The walls were wood-paneled, in beautiful condition, and shelves were built along two sides. These were filled with boxes of various sizes, and jars of things like lotions and shoe polish. Clothing was hung on hangers by wall brackets all about. Everything was very vivid. What a waste of a great room, I thought. Then I saw that the room had no windows at all. I knew I was in someone’s house, and that my body was in bed. But where was I? Suddenly, I knew that the house belonged to Bill and Beverly Gray, previous tenants in our apartment house. They had moved to a house about a year previously, and I hadn’t seen them since.

That’s all that I remembered. I must have fallen back into a normal dream state, and when I awakened, it was morning. I wrote down what I had seen, dated the record as usual, told Rob and wondered about calling Beverly to check. She was only an acquaintance, however; we had never been close. So I let it rest.

About two days later I met her downtown, the first time I’d seen her since her move. My first book was already out, and she knew about my work, so I told her of the projection and asked if the room meant anything to her at all. Her eyes widened as she told me that I’d described an inner room in her new house perfectly, down to the bare bulb in the ceiling and the paneling. The room was really far too large for a closet, though small enough for a normal room. She hadn’t known what to use it for, and so she’d finally turned it into a closet.

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.”

Again, the next thing I knew it was morning. I wrote down what I remembered. The trouble was, I have two students named Tom. When I mentioned this in class, one had no idea of what kind of towels were in the bathroom. The other said my description seemed to apply to those in his bathroom linen closet. It wasn’t until several weeks later, however, that Rob and I visited Tom Height. “Come on, check out the bathroom,” he said, as everyone laughed. But the minute I entered, I saw it was the room I’d been in. The closet was right inside the door, and a jut in the wall blocked vision of the rest of the room. The cabinet and towels were identical.

Certain chemical changes must come about in the physical organism before projection can occur. Were it not for these, you would still be imprisoned within the corporal image. You know that dreaming has a definite chemical basis, that chemicals built up during period of waking experience are released through dreams. Not only are these released, but they form a propelling action that allows energy to flow in the opposite direction. As chemical reactions allow the body to utilize energy and form physical materializations, so the excess built up becomes, then, a propelling force, allowing action to flow in what you would call subjective directions.

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.

The expectation and knowledge that you are a part of all energy will allow you to realize that all the energy you require will be given. Your attitude toward what is possible determines what is possible for you in very definite terms. …