“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

3. Permanence is not a matter of time. Existence has value in terms of intensities.

5. Stability in time sequence is not a prerequisite requirement for an object, except as a root assumption in the physical universe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I was fully alert and more curious than I can say. Several times I put my hand out as far as it could go and wiggled my fingers. The air stirred, like pudding. There was much greater contrast than usual between the very dark clouds high above and the rest of the air, and colors — dark purple, a greyish white and several green and dark greys — almost appeared like clumps, thick and then thinning.