“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

NOTE: On April 13 at 6:00 A.M., the huge K Mart at the Mattydale Shopping Center near Syracuse burned in a sudden fire. I saw this on TV when I awoke in the morning. The news film showed the food cans exploding — or rather, the newscaster explained this was what happened. The plate glass windows blew out, and all of this was in the news. I got up at 6:30 A.M. so I don’t know if the experience was a projection at the time of the fire or a clairvoyant viewing of it. A drugstore next to the market was undamaged.

Physically, I was sleeping flat on my back with my hands down at my sides. My astral body was in the same approximate position, perhaps six inches above. The state and sensation were remarkably steady and pleasant. I felt fully awake, aware of what I was doing and quite free and weightless. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. At the time I remembered asking Jane in the past how you could distinguish between dream projection and dreams. The difference is obvious, when you have the experience at first hand.

Before he went back to sleep, Rob told me what had happened. I was amazed, because I hadn’t been in bed over five minutes yet. I’d been waiting for his snoring to quiet down or hopefully, stop. When it didn’t, I asked him to turn over. The bathroom light had been off only ten minutes at the most and the bathroom door closed. Except for undressing, these were the last two things I did before going to bed. A humorous domestic quandary results. Now I’ll have to think twice before asking Rob to turn over if he’s snoring. I’ll be afraid of disturbing a projection.

“Did I try this before Jane came to bed, before I became conscious of what was happening?”

I lay down to experiment and fell asleep at once to have a confused experience, mixed with dream elements. I found myself getting out of my body with some difficulty, only I was someone else or in someone else’s body, a young woman student. I went running out of a house into a landscaped yard, sat down, left that body and went strolling through the yard. Other people were there, and I was jubilant because no one saw me. A young man stood by the steps. I finally said, ‘I’m out of my body. Can you see me? Can you?’ He said that he could, and didn’t seem at all impressed, so I went back into the other body again. I started to wake up and realized that some kind of a projection had been involved, though I wasn’t sure how much was contaminated by dream elements. I decided to let myself fall back into a doze to see what else developed and to monitor my consciousness.

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.

As I was entering my body, I heard Rob in the bathroom. I wondered if he would come in to see what I was doing. This awakened my physical body.

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.

Finally I looked up and saw my mother in front of me. She was lying in bed, and I couldn’t tell if I was in her bedroom or seeing through the wall or what. I started thinking about what Jane said about people being out-of-body without knowing it and wondered if Mom was out right then. With this, she sat right up and pointed at me. This reminded me of the way that Seth points at people sometimes. Apparently this worried me, for I ran to my body for protection. After this I came awake in my body and wrote down my first out-of-body trip!

This made me think of looking at my physical body. Rob’s, we knew, would be at work. I went into the bedroom, but the bed was as I left it, only empty. This really confused me. I called Rob. He couldn’t see my physical body either. “My body’s got to be in bed,” I said. “Why can’t we see it?” We discussed what had happened so far, but couldn’t solve the mystery. “Could it be that we’re really both physical after all?” I asked.

I still couldn’t figure out what had really happened with Rob and me, though. Luckily, in the next, 481st session on May 12, 1969, Seth began an explanation. The session also contains further hints for dream projections.

In the same way do you travel in other realities without being aware of it. You perceived in a ‘normal’ fashion, which should show you again that perception is not dependent upon the physical image. You have both traveled together in such a fashion from the dream state. There is no reason why you cannot try such experiments, trying to project at the same time.

It is because of this instantaneous creation and projection of inner reality outward into form that you experience time within the physical system — to train you, to give you time to learn to handle your own creations. Projection experiments, then, should only be tried when you are in a peaceful state of mind, as Ruburt should know after his black creature experience [described in The Seth Material].

Now, there are ‘objective’ realities that exist within the astral system. There are more than your own thought forms, in other words. Your own thought-forms can be definite aids when you are in the proper mental condition, and they can impede your progress if you are not. For example, a man in a desperate frame of mind is more apt to emphasize the unpleasant aspects of the news and to see bitterness rather than the joy in the faces of those he meets. He will ignore a contented child playing on one side of the street and notice, instead, a dirty ragged child, even though he be further away. So your frame of mind when projecting will largely determine the kind of experiences you have.

The original intensity behind the construction determines its duration. … Left alone, any such construction will eventually vanish. It will leave a trace, however, in electromagnetic reality where it can then be activated by anyone when certain conditions are met or are favorable.