“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

More Projection Instructions
Projections as Strange Sense Experiences

Here, rely on common sense. If you find a girl in a bathing suit standing on a wintery street, for example, one or the other has to go. If the girl is the main incongruous element, and the rest all fits in, then will the girl to disappear. Keep this up with any other such images that you meet. Again, you’ll be left with the basic environment and can proceed as you want. You can accept such images and play around with them or watch them to see what develops, but only if you realize they are hallucinations. There are exceptions to this practice, however, as the next Seth excerpt shows.

In your journeys into inner reality, you cannot proceed with these same root assumptions. Reality, per se, changes completely according to the basic root agreements that you accept. One of the root agreements upon which physical reality is based is the assumption that objects have a reality independent of any subjective cause and that these objects, within definite specified limitations, are permanent.

There is a cohesiveness to the inner universe and to the systems that are not basically physical. But this is based upon an entirely different set of root assumptions and these are the keys that alone will let you manipulate within other systems or understand them. There are several major root assumptions connected here and many minor ones:

7. The spacious present is here more available to the senses.

Only if these basic root assumptions are taken for granted will your projection experiences make sense to you. Different rules simply apply. Your subjective experience is extremely important here; that is, the vividness of any given experience in terms of intensity will be far more important than anything else.

To a large extent in the physical system, your habit of perceiving time as a sequence forms the type of experience and also limits it. This habit also unites the experiences, however. The unifying and limiting aspects of consecutive moments are absent in inner reality. Time, in other words, cannot be counted upon to unify action. The unifying elements will be those of your own understanding and abilities. You are not forced to perceive action as a series of moments within inner reality, therefore.

In physical experience, you are dealing with an environment with which you are familiar. You have completely forgotten the chaos and unpredictable nature it presented before learning processes were channeled into its specific directions. You learned to perceive reality in a highly specified fashion. When you are dealing with inner, or basically non-physical realities, you must learn to become unspecialized and then learn a new set of principles. You will soon learn to trust your perceptions, whether or not the experiences seem to make logical sense.

Your mental processes are formed and developed as a result of this conditioning. The intuitive portions of the personality are not so formed, and these will operate to advantage in any inner exploration.

You are basically capable of seeing any particular location as it existed a thousand years in your past or as it will exist a thousand years in your future. The physical senses serve to blot out more aspects of reality than they allow you to perceive … yet, in many inner explorations you will automatically translate experience into terms that the senses can use. … Any such translation is, nevertheless, a second-hand version of the original — an important point to remember.

Root assumptions represent the basic premises upon which a given existence-system is formed. These are the ground rules, so to speak. Your physical mechanisms are equipped to function in such a way that reality is perceived through the lens of particular root assumptions, then. Using the physical senses, it is almost impossible for you to perceive reality in any other way.

This highly falsifies such information. The inner senses are not bound by those assumptions, however. … This is why so many psychic or subjective experiences seem to contradict physical laws. You must learn the ‘laws’ that apply to other systems.

The root assumptions that govern physical reality are indeed valid, but within physical reality alone. They do not apply elsewhere. There is a natural tendency to continue judging experience against these assumptions, however. With experience, the habit will lose much of its hold. Inner experience must be colored to some extent by the physical system, while you exist in it. In order for such data to rise to conscious levels, for example, it must be translated into terms that the ego can understand, and the translation is bound to distort the original experience. …

The organization however is, biologically speaking, artificial and learned. It is no less rigid for that reason. This organizational structure of perception can be broken up, as recent LSD experiments certainly show. This can be dangerous, however. The fact that this does occur shows that the systems of perception are not a part of over-all structure biologically, but learned secondary responses. It is disturbing to the whole organism, however, to break up the strong pattern of usual perception. Inner stability of response is suddenly swept away. Changes that are not yet known occur within the nervous system under these circumstances, both electromagnetic and chemical.

The inner senses alone are equipped to process and perceive other reality systems. Even the distortions can be kept at a minimum with training. Indiscriminate use of the psychedelic drugs can severely shake up learned patterns of response that are necessary for effective manipulation within physical reality; break subtle connections and you disturb electromagnetic functions. Ego failure can result.

Development of the inner senses is a much more effective method of perceiving other realities, and, followed correctly, the ego is not only stronger but more flexible. Even consciousness of physical reality is increased. Such development becomes an unfolding and natural expansion of the whole personality.

The root assumptions upon which physical reality is formed represent secure ground to the ego. We always operate with the ego’s consent. It interprets the inner knowledge gained in its own way, true, but it is immeasurably enriched by so doing.

Some out-of-body experiences are extremely difficult to categorize and involve extraordinarily sensuous events that remain vivid long after their occurrence. Some are suggestive of drug-induced episodes, except for the greater sense of alertness and self-control. I have two particular experiences of mine in mind.

There is constant translation of inner reality into objects in the waking state and a constant translation of ideas into pseudo-objects in the dream state. Within a certain range of dream reality, ideas and thoughts can be translated into pseudo-objects and transported. This is what happens when you adopt a pseudo-form in projection, though I am simplifying this considerably.

As a rule, you see, there is little communication within the uncamouflaged areas. They act as boundaries, even while they represent the basic stuff of which all camouflage is composed. (Without the camouflage, you would perceive nothing with the physical senses.)

The sentence is really meaningless, however, because the physical senses are themselves camouflage. There would be nothing to translate. It is only the inner senses that will allow you to perceive under these circumstances. Theoretically, if you can bridge the gap between various reincarnations, then you can bridge the gap between your system and another.

One point: There are other systems all about and within your own. The undifferentiated areas move out like spirals, through all reality. Little resistence is encountered within them. They represent inner roads that connect systems, as well as divide them. The traveler must leave his own camouflage paraphernalia behind him, however, or he will get nowhere.

However, it is possible to travel under such circumstances, and some of the data would be retained by inner portions of the self. In a creative individual, some of this information might be symbolically expressed in a painting or other work of art.

Each brushstroke of a painting represents concentrated experience and compressed perceptions. In a good painting, these almost explode when perceived by the lively consciousness of another. The observer is washed over by intensities. The excellent work of art recreates for the observer inner experience of his own, also, of which he has never been aware. As you know, paintings have motion, yet the painting itself does not move. This idea should help you understand experience in terms of intensities and projections or the movement of consciousness without necessarily motion through space.

My own most recent projection was very close to home, compared to the possible journeys Seth mentioned in the previous excerpts. Again, it reminded me later of reported sense experience under the influence of drugs. It was most unusual and I’m sure I’ll never forget it.

That experience is far more vivid than anything else that happened to me that day or during that entire month so far. It will be remembered long after I forget what else I did that day. It does no good to call such episodes hallucinations. They are, above all, valid psychological events. They enrich normal experience, broaden the usual restrictions of daily perception and encourage creative thought. The same applies to all of the dreams and projections mentioned in this book. These dimensions of experience and consciousness co-exist with normal reality as we know it, and I believe that in them we exercise abilities that are ours by right and heritage.