“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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:

8. The only barriers are mental or psychic ones.

‘This is how dreams work,’ you may think. ‘This cannot be a legitimate projection.’ Yet you may be perceiving the street and the field that existed ‘before’ it, and the images may be transposed one upon the other. If you try to judge such an experience with physical root assumptions, it will be meaningless. As mentioned earlier, you may also perceive a building that will never exist in physical reality. This does not mean that the form is illusion. You are simply in a position where you can pick up and translate the energy pattern before you.

One involved spectacular color. I lay down to try a projection one Friday afternoon last January — my last projection experiment for the winter. Rob was out. It was another dreary day with veils of light rain falling. I was just beginning the final draft of this book and told myself that I could have an excellent projection to use in this section. I specifically requested a projection within the room, rather than to an outside location.

I kept exclaiming about the colors and ran into the next room to see if the effect went through the whole apartment. My image in the bathroom mirror stopped me. I was wearing a lovely headdress of orange and yellow intertwined threads, each one glistening in the golden light that now filled the room. I took it off and examined it, wonderingly, then looked in the mirror again. My own hair shone, each separate hair vigorous and sensuous with color. My skin appeared the same way, giving forth the most subtle tones.

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.

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.

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!

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.