“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Projections from the dream state intrigue me because in them I believe we encounter the inside of our own consciousness in a most direct fashion. In a way, we are completely on our own, manipulating in a subjective environment, aware of the workings of consciousness when it is not soaked up or fastened upon objective specifics. Such exploration is full of surprises. In these states, consciousness operates within definite conditions, within an ordered system of experience. But we must struggle to discover what these are as opposed to the hallucinatory images we set up ourselves against or superimposed upon this reality.

While we may “come awake” spontaneously within a dream, certain procedures do help, and these can induce projections from the dream state. They have been mentioned before in previous chapters, but here I’ll give them as briefly and simply as possible. First you must realize that you are dreaming. Suggestion to this effect, given before sleep, facilitates this recognition.

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.

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:

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.

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 practice of psychological time will allow you to reach these portions of the self. The ego is not artifically disorganized by such practice. It is simply bypassed for the moment. The experience gained does become a part of the physical structure, but there is no massive disorganization of perception, since the ego agrees to step aside momentarily.

It is not bombarded, as with the drug experiments, and forced to experience chaotic and frightening perceptions that can terrify it into complete disorder. Survival in your system is dependent upon the highly specialized, focused, limited but specific qualities of the ego. It should not be rigid. Neither should it be purposely weakened.

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.

The ego can exist only within the context of these assumptions. The primary dream experience is finally woven into a structure composed of these assumptions, and it is these you remember. These serve you as basic information but the information is in symbolic form. Objects, you see, are symbols. Dream objects are often symbols of realities that the ego could not otherwise perceive.

The next thing I knew, I was flying above land a good deal south of here because there was no snow, and a Middle-Atlantic-States-type landscape. Many cars were heading north, and there was some commotion at an intersection below. A woman came out of a house nearby to watch. Some kind of a roadblock was set up. I tried to come closer to the ground to see more clearly, but instead was whisked back through the air to Elmira.

“Rob, I had the wildest experience, but unfortunately I’m back now because all that great color is gone,” I said; and I told him what happened. As I finished speaking, something caught my eye — the wallpaper. While it was not as colorful as it had been earlier, neither was it the white painted wall that should have been there.

Actually, I was only remotely aware of the difficulties of my hand. Instead, my mind was filled with memories of the spectacular colors I had seen. For a moment, I was almost enthralled as I partially recalled them out of the nowhere into which they had vanished. I had to go downtown to meet Rob for grocery shopping, so I dressed quickly. But it seemed that all the color had drained away from the world. Walking downtown, I was depressed. It was weeks later before I regained my normal feelings for our apartment. In the meantime, it seemed insufferably dreary. For that matter, so did the rest of the world. I’ve had normal dreams that were in vivid color, but nothing like that, and at no other time has my usual earthly environment been bathed in such iridescence.

You will sometimes automatically translate this reality into physical terms. Such images will be hallucinatory, but it may take awhile for you to distinguish their true nature. It must be understood, however, that all physical objects are hallucinatory. They may be called mass hallucinations.

Once more: The undifferentiated layers are composed of the vitality that forms the camouflage of all systems. Such an area is not really a thing in itself, but a portion of vitality that contains no camouflage, and is therefore unrecognizable to those within any given system. You are in touch with infinity in such areas, since it is only camouflage that gives you the conception of time. …

The completely uncamouflaged layer would be rather bewildering. You might automatically be tempted to project images into it. They would not take, so to speak, but would appear and disappear with great rapidity. This is a silent area. Thoughts would not be perceived here, as a rule, for the symbols for them would not be understood.

If a certain intensity is reached, however — a peak of intensity — then you could perceive the spacious present as it exists within your native system. You could, from this peak, look into other systems, but you would not understand what you perceived, not having the proper root assumptions. I have used the idea of neighboring systems for simplicity’s sake, as if they were laid out end to end. Obviously, such is not the case. The systems [of reality] are more like the various segments of a tangerine, with the uncamouflaged boundary areas like the white membrane between the tangerine sections.

The tangerine, then, would be compared to a group of many systems, yet it would represent in itself but one portion of an unperceived whole. The tangerine would be but one segment of a larger system. You can see, then, why some projections would lead you in a far different direction from your linear sort of travel and why time as you know it would be meaningless.

Nor do such projections necessarily involve journeys through space as you know it. There are systems, vivid in intensity, that have no existence in physical reality at all. It is now thought, I believe, that time and space are basically one, but they are both a part of something else. They are merely the camouflage patterns by which you perceive reality. Space as you perceive it in the dream state comes much closer to the reality.

Last Thursday, May 6, 1971, 1 took an hour nap in the late morning. No suggestions were given. It was another dark day, and the air was full of moisture. I “came to” in Rob’s studio. I was standing before the open window, looking out at the pear tree, but it was the air itself that captured my attention. It was transparent as always but thick as Jell-O.

Astonished, I thrust my hand out the window, and the motion set ripples out, making fairly deep “cracks” near my fingers and more shallow ones farther away. The tree, I saw, was not only held up and supported by its roots deep in the earth, but by the air itself. Why had I ever thought that branches stayed up simply because this was how branches acted? The air itself helped hold them!

What would happen to objects falling? I wondered. From everything I saw, I judged that they would glide to earth or drop slowly through that textured air. The effect was far from inert, though. The sky and air moved constantly, perhaps like very heavy jellied water, with the trees stuck in like huge seaweed. I felt as if I could almost walk on the air, but from the motion of my hand through it, I knew it was not normally heavy enough to support me.

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.

The experience was so intriguing that I thought of it often in the days following. That Sunday as we were out driving, the idea suddenly struck me that there might be a force coming up from the earth, in opposition to gravity. The two could be part of one phenomena, of course. It could account for the fact that seeds do push up through the earth, not only attracted by the sun but nudged by this force beneath.