“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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?

A few days after the last session, I sat in my small office at the art gallery, looking out at the landscaped yard. That afternoon it was difficult to keep my mind on my work. People were coming and going in the hallways. Had they lived before? Was their consciousness born anew, and was it really something quite independent of the images they wore?

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.

And while I persisted in my uncertainity, Seth continued to explain the nature of the interior universe, giving clues and hints that I would eventually follow, laying down the framework that would allow me to deal with precisely those questions that concerned me.

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. …

All kinds of thoughts flooded to my mind. Consciousness was independent of the body — Seth was right — and if that was true, then there was no reason why he couldn’t be what he said he was: an independent personality, out of the flesh. But why hadn’t I caught on sooner? And why hadn’t I run up to see if the house mailbox had a name on it? I couldn’t wait till Rob came home so I could tell him what happened.

“Well, I know I was out of my body. That’s what counts as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “In that ‘Idea Construction’ thing I didn’t seem to have a body — I seemed to just be my consciousness. So I never made any connection at first between the two experiences. …