“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The next point is to realize that you are alert, conscious and awake, while your body is asleep. You can then explore the environment in which you find yourself or travel to another location. Instead of “coming to” in your home, however, you may instead become alert in another location, a town, another house or unfamiliar place where checking against usual circumstances is nearly impossible.

To travel somewhere else, will yourself there. Often travel seems instantaneous. At other times, you may find yourself swept from place to place, with little control. If you come awake while still within your physical body or close to it, you may or may not see your own body as described earlier. You may also find yourself in non-physical locations or places in which matter does not behave the way it usually does. Seth explains this very well in Session 284, September 7, 1966.

The whole physical organism of the body has been trained to react to certain patterns, these based on physical root assumptions. The nervous system reacts definitely to visual block images. Such images are received through the skin, as well as through the eyes. The whole system is highly complicated and organized. This is obviously necessary for physical survival. …

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.

I returned to my body and experienced a false awakening in which Rob spoke to me. I couldn’t wait to open my eyes to see what the room looked like and if the colors were still present. Instead, the room was faded by contrast.

It is possible, theoretically, to travel to any system in this manner and bypass others, you see. Such a traveler would not age physically. His body would be in a suspended state. Only a very few individuals have traveled in this manner. Most of the knowledge gained escapes the ego, and the experiences cannot be translated by the physical brain.

Cautiousness and wonder made me pause. For one thing, the air inside the room was normal. For another, I felt as if I was observing a legitimate glimpse of air from the framework of a different kind of perception. Was this in some way air slowed down? And if so, was my “body” in the same state? Was this what air was really like and was it perceived this way by certain kinds of consciousness or at particular stages of molecular activity? All of these thoughts went through my mind, but before I could figure out what other experiments I could try, I snapped back to my body.