“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At the precise time of Ruburt’s dream, Miss Cunningham was deciding to leave this plane of reality. Ruburt received the message directly. The unwillingness on Miss Cunningham’s part represented her present personality’s protest against the change that a deeper part of herself deemed necessary and proper.

Miss Cunningham had been preparing herself for her own departure since she heard of the possible operations. Yet consciously, she was ignorant of her own inner decision.

She did not remember him … as she taught his children. He admired her very much as his children, one in particular, found her an excellent teacher. Frank Withers considered her a friend, attaching more importance than she did to her influence upon his children. But beyond this, Miss Cunningham’s present personality has been gently disentangling itself from this plane of reality — and she simply did not remember him.

Of course, the conscious mind cannot be aware of such critical inner decisions. … The disentanglement of her personality has been gentle and gradual. She is focusing less and less in this plane of reality, and again, gradually, she will begin to focus in another. There is a period of adjustment after leaving any plane, although yours involves the most difficulty since your camouflage pattern is unusually rigid.

So the first spring of the sessions came, a cold bright March. Miss Cunningham’s apartment door became a stimulus to my constant questions. Every time I passed it, I wondered again: Was she transferring her consciousness to another level of reality? Would she survive death when it came, in meaningful terms? And behind all these questions there was the big one: Was Seth really a personality who had survived death? And would I really ever know?

I wrote four more poems of varying merit about that one event and behind the whole affair was defiant recognition of the value of any consciousness, whatever its form. And the deeper question: Why was it ever annihilated, at least in our terms? Why was life constructed to be destroyed? I knew, even then, that I had to find my own answers — that each of us does. And yet at that point, I felt duty-bound to question my own experiences, Seth and the sessions because I refused to hide in self-delusions.

If you will use psychological time as I have told you, you will get immediate first-hand experience with many facets of reality which take me pages to explain with the use of words. All entities are self-aware portions of the energy of All That Is. They are self-generating, and if you understand this, you will stop thinking in terms of beginnings and endings.

The inner senses operate on all planes and under all circumstances. The outer senses vary according to plane and circumstance. The outer senses are dependable only in terms of the definite system of reality for which they were constructed. Their purpose, of course, is to enable the conscious personality to recognize as valid, camouflage patterns that are only valid under certain conditions. …

Joseph was correct when he spoke of entities creating stages upon which to act out their problems. The point is that once the play begins, the actors are so completely engrossed in their roles that they forget that they themselves wrote the play, constructed the sets or are even acting.

The reason is rather apparent: If you know that a situation is ‘imaginary,’ you are not going to come to grips with it. This way, you have your actors taking the situation as it seems to be but looking about in amazement now and then to wonder how they got where they are, who constructed the sets and so forth. They do not realize that the whole thing is self-created, nor should they in the main, since the urgency to solve problems would dissolve.

During these springtime sessions, my voice began to deepen considerably. At times it was startlingly vibrant and powerful, with the masculine tones quite noticeable. Rob was convinced that it contained an additional energy, rather impossible for my own vocal chords — the resonance in particular.

I blinked my eyes. Did I have amnesia? Had I actually walked here under my own power and forgotten? It didn’t occur to me then that I was having an out-of-body experience. For one thing, Seth had only mentioned them briefly; and for another, everything was so real that I took it for granted that I was in my body and as physical as anything else was.

We had no idea then that I would be involved in still more startling episodes with Miss Cunningham, but I grinned, looking out the window. I’d been on my first real “field trip.” I didn’t have to take everything Seth said on faith alone. The psychological time exercises suddenly took on greater significance. I was ready now to really use the inner senses. And almost immediately after this, Seth began his discussions on the nature of dream reality and the methods that would let us explore it for ourselves. If I could leave my body and go out into the physical world, then I didn’t see why I couldn’t leave it and explore the inner one.