“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Our living room seemed twice as cozy that evening, with the warm lights and Willie sleeping on the rug. But I said to Rob, “Look, Miss Cunningham was as rational and bright as either of us not too long ago. What happened? How do we know it won’t happen to us?” And the comfortable room suddenly seemed a facade. In years to come, where would we be? What difference could it make that we ever sat in this room, or had sessions, or moved furniture, or stroked the cat? So I didn’t feel like going into a trance.

The actual communication is not in words or pictures. Material from the inner senses is seldom experienced in its true form. What you get is a hasty twisting of channels, a rather inept and sometimes rather disastrous attempt to pick up such information with the outer senses.

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.

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?

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. …

Ruburt was upset, and with good reason. … It goes without saying that a bird’s death is inevitable, but a cat killing a bird does not have to juggle the same sort of values with which a man must be concerned. For now, suffice it to say that to kill for self-protection or food on your plane does not involve you in what we may call for the first time, I believe, karmic consequences.

To kill for convenience … or for the sake of killing involves rather dire consequences, and the emotional value behind such killing is often as important as what is killed. That is, the lust [for] killing is also a matter that brings dire consequences, regardless of the particular living thing that is killed. This involves value judgments of a very important type, and I will not go into them tonight.

For a moment I didn’t know what to say. It was almost impossible to imagine Miss Cunningham indulging in such behavior. Then I remembered the date given by Seth, so I asked as casually as I could, “When did all this happen?”

Then the screen door opened. Dr. Levine, Miss Cunningham’s doctor, came out on the porch. He stood talking for a moment with a woman who remained inside. I thought: “I might as well ask him about Miss Cunningham anyway, regardless of what’s going on.” So I waited; in a moment, the doctor came down the steps. I walked over to him and said, “Hi Sam. Could I talk to you for a minute?”

He looked right through me, taking no notice of me at all. Since we were acquaintances, I was indignant. “Sam,” I said again, but he walked briskly past. I looked at him fully in the face, running ahead of him, ready to confront him with “What’s the matter with you?” But, instead, I realized that he didn’t see me. He never saw me at all.

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.

He was envious. I was triumphant. This time, I didn’t have to wait for him to report what I’d done while I was in a Seth trance. I’d been myself. “And I know it wasn’t a hallucination,” I said. “I was completely alert, and the whole thing brings up so many questions … and ideas for experiments.”

Yet, as badly as I wanted to check this out, I just couldn’t bring myself to call Dr. Levine. “He’ll think I was out of my mind instead of out of my body,” I said. “And what excuse could I use? If I knew what the street was, I could at least say, ‘I thought I saw you on such-and-such a street.’ “

“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. …

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.