“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The next thing I knew, I had the feeling that I was hovering in our dark bathroom. We close the door between the bath and living room to keep Willie, our cat, in the living room at night. I was before the closed door, but wasn’t able to penetrate it. I felt no fear or panic. Although I was awake while sleeping and definitely projecting, I didn’t realize this at first. The fact slowly dawned on me. This was the first time that the fear element wasn’t present for me. I had no actual memory of leaving my body, and I must have fallen off into normal sleep for a moment, because the next thing I knew, I found myself out of my body, hovering just above my sleeping physical image.

I don’t know if I would have succeeded in getting further or not because now Jane said to me, ‘Hon, you’re snoring. Turn over.’ I heard her very clearly. … That ended it. I had no further success, although the pleasant aura surrounding the episode lingered. The whole time I felt that so much was possible with the state, that just beyond my ability at this moment lay wonderful accomplishments. … At no time did I see the astral cord.

I worked at my drawing table. The light was on, and the windows dark. It was clearly nighttime. After a moment I realized that I wasn’t supposed to be in the studio, that I had just gone to bed and should be in the living room. As soon as I made this connection, I snapped back to my body. Jane was beside me, so she had just come to bed. I knew I had not been dreaming and felt a most peculiar sense of suspension and ease.

I was still walking very slowly, with my astral eyes slitted to cut down the focus of distractions. I closed them to deepen my trance and reached out for the bathroom doorknob. I felt it hard and round, perfectly normal in my astral hand. Then I paused in uncertainty; something didn’t seem right. What had I done wrong now? I opened my astral eyes fully and stared down at my hand. It circled a ‘knob’ of air. For just another moment I felt the hardness, the bulk of that knob. Then only air was there. Obviously, I’d hallucinated the doorknob. The door was still several feet away. Disappointed with myself, I returned to my body, determined to plan out a new course of action.

Between the first episode and the second, I was fully alert, awake in my astral body, but still connected with the physical one. In this state I experienced what I can only call ecstasy, involving the entire body. While the feeling was not localized, it certainly felt strongly sexual in nature, and when I left my body, there was a moment when this continued very intensely.

Ignoring the light, I willed myself to go to the house of the Linden family, across town. Instantly I found myself there on the porch. For a moment I wondered if I was in the right place, then I saw that the old side porch had been completely removed and another front porch added. Was this a distortion or hallucination? I willed all hallucinations to vanish, but everything remained the same. This usually means that the environment is a “real” location. It was dark, with no lights on in the house, and I decided to go inside.

At this point the pulsations of the white light inside my head quickened and grew very powerful. I felt for a moment as if my consciousness could really be swept away or as if I could really have difficulty getting back to my body. I kept “testing” the strength of the light during the whole experience, and each time decided to continue despite it. Now I decided I’d better return.

I found myself then in my astral body above my physical one, but in reversed position. My astral hand with its strange sensations and pulsing light was to the south, over my physical feet. For a few moments I kept fluctuating — back to the park then back to my room — with the white light pulsating very strongly. Finally I just wished myself into my body, experienced some difficulty, a brief instant of unconsciousness, and fell back in.