“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

More Projection Instructions
Projections as Strange Sense Experiences

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.

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.

Elements from past, present and future may be indiscriminately available to you. You may be convinced that a given episode is the result of subconscious fabrication, simply because the time sequence is not maintained, and this could be a fine error. In a given dream projection, for example, you may experience an event that is obviously from the physical past, yet within it there may be elements that do not fit. In an old-fashioned room of the 1700’s, you may look out and see an automobile pass by. Obviously, you think: distortion. Yet you may be straddling time in such an instance, perceiving, say, the room as it was in the 1700’s and the street as it appears in your present. These elements may appear side by side. The car may suddenly disappear before your eyes, to be replaced by an animal or the whole street may turn into a field.

‘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.

In a projection, the problems will be of a different sort. The form of a man, for example, may be a thought-form, or a fragment sent quite unconsciously by another individual whom it resembles. It may be another projectionist, like yourself. It may be a potential form like any potential object… a record of a form played over and over again.

The images and forms Seth speaks about in that session would not disappear when you banished your own hallucinations, as mentioned earlier. In the next session, Seth explained more about root assumptions and for the first time mentioned psychedelic experience in connection with projection.

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.

With this realization I really awoke to the ordinary room and checked the clock. The whole experience took place between 2 P.M., the last time I’d looked at the clock, and 3 P.M. Then I realized that my left hand was completely immobile, folded up and locked tight. There was no feeling in it whatsoever. When I tried to move it, it wouldn’t budge. I decided that it was a muscular rigidity resulting from the projection and waited quietly for several minutes. Then slowly it regained mobility and feeling.

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.

Now, during some projections, you may be aware of nothing as far as surroundings are concerned. There will only be the mobility of your own consciousness. If this occurs, you will be traveling through such an uncamouflaged area. You could then expect to encounter next a more differentiated environment, that seems to become clearer as you progress toward the heart of another system.

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.

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.

Projections within your own system will, of course, involve you with some kind of camouflage. If none is present, you will know you are out of the system. The dream universe is obviously closely connected with your own, since pseudo-objects are present. Even there, you are to some extent free from the space-time elements of your own system. Within the dream state, then, you are in the ‘outward’ areas of the physically oriented universe.

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.