“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to see the television program, because I’ve never seen myself as Seth in trance except in a few photographs. Seth manifests through me, addressing himself to others who feel the impact of his personality, but I can’t see this as they do from the outside, objectively. To observers, Seth’s otherness from me is apparent in the way the open eyes are used, in the gestures and rearrangement of facial patterns. We simply use the body in a different way.

While I’m writing this book in the three-dimensional world, for example, the source material for it comes from the other side of consciousness — that dimension that is revealed to us in dreams, inspiration, trance states and creativity. This book is about Seth, dreams and “astral projection” — all aspects of a different kind of consciousness than the objective one with which we are usually occupied.

And, as far as I know, Seth has no imprisoning body. He projects part of his consciousness, at least at times, into mine. Curious thought — I can also imagine some good-humored game of musical chairs in which I try to get out of my body, while Seth tries to get into it. While this presents a rather hilarious image, it is actually unfair. Seth doesn’t have any great interest in taking over my body for any length of time, while I have an insatiable curiosity about the experience of getting out of mine.

I have been speaking for Seth in twice-weekly sessions since late 1963. At the very least, this has given me personal experience with altered states of consciousness and glimpses into subjective areas largely unexplored. Certainly, it was because of Seth that I found myself studying the dream reality that comes into focus while the body sleeps.

My out-of-body experiences are not nearly as well directed, deliberate or effective as Seth’s behavior is here, for example. Seth dictates one final draft of his own book, while I do at least three drafts of my own. (This present book is my third since the sessions began, so Seth is hardly “stealing” any of my creative energy.)

If you have little memory of your dream locations when you are awake, then remember that you have little memory of your waking locations when you are in the dream situation. Both are legitimate and both are realities. When the body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell. But this, dear friends, has nothing to do with space, for the dream location exists simultaneously with the room in which the body sleeps.

Actually, this is a simple analogy and only carries us so far, but in the beginning Seth used it as a way of giving us some idea of man’s current (and artificial) relationship to dream reality. Later, by following the material and Seth’s instructions, we discovered that we could dissolve these barriers to some extent. We have been able to prove, to ourselves at least, that dream events are quite real. Flying dreams are not all disguised sexual fantasies, as Freud maintained, for example. In many of them we are flying, and the destinations we reach are quite physical. Our records show clearly that what we saw in some such episodes were not imaginary places, but locations we visited while the body slept. Some are described in this book.

In other words, while most books are written about events that occur in waking reality, this one will be mainly concerned with events that happen precisely when consciousness is turned away from normal objective life. Much more is involved than even the nature of the dream state and man’s fascinating ability to withdraw consciousness from the body. These phenomena are only evidences of the greater creative consciousness that is inherent and active in each of us — the interior universe of which we know so little.