“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Not only are you part of other independent selves, each one focused in its own reality, but there is a sympathetic relationship that exists. For example, because of this relationship, your experience need not be limited by the physical perceptive mechanisms. You can draw upon knowledge that belongs to these other independent selves. You can learn to focus your attention away from physical reality, to learn new methods of perception that will enable you to enlarge your concept of reality and greatly expand your own experience.

It is only because you believe that physical existence is the only valid one, that it does not occur to you to look for other realities. Such things as telepathy and clairvoyance can give you hints of other kinds of perception, but you are also involved in quite definite experiences both while you are normally waking and while you are asleep.

The so-called stream of consciousness is simply that — one small stream of thoughts, images, and impressions — that is part of a much deeper river of consciousness that represents your own far greater existence and experience. You spend all your time examining this one small stream, so that you become hypnotized by its flow, and entranced by its motion. Simultaneously these other streams of perception and consciousness go by without your notice, yet they are very much a part of you, and they represent quite valid aspects, events, actions, emotions with which you are also involved in other layers of reality.

(9:35.) You are as actively and vividly concerned in these realities as you are in the one in which your main attention is now focused. Now, as you are merely concerned with your physical body and physical self as a rule, you give your attention to the stream of consciousness that seems to deal with it. These other streams of consciousness, however, are connected with other self-forms that you do not perceive. The body, in other words, is simply one manifestation of what you are in one reality, but in these other realities you have other forms.

“You” are not divorced from these other streams of consciousness in any basic way; only your focus of attention closes you off from them, and from the events in which they are involved. If you think of your stream of consciousness as transparent, however, then you can learn to look through and beneath it to others that lie in other beds of reality. You can also learn to rise above your present stream of consciousness and perceive others that run, for analogy’s sake, parallel. The point is that you are only limited to the self you know if you think that you are, and if you do not realize that that self is far from your entire identity.

Any creative work involves you in a cooperative process in which you learn to dip into these other streams of consciousness, and come up with a perception that has far more dimensions than one arising from the one narrow, usual stream of consciousness that you know. Great creativity is then multidimensional for this reason. Its origin is not from one reality, but from many, and it is tinged with the multiplicity of that origin.

(9:49.) Great creativity always seems greater than its pure physical dimension and reality. By contrast with the so-called usual, it appears almost as an intrusion. It takes the breath away. Such creativity automatically reminds each man of his own multidimensional reality. The words “know thyself,” therefore, mean far more than most people ever suppose.

Now in moments of solitude you may become aware of some of these other streams of consciousness. You may at times for example, hear words, or see images that appear out of context with your own thoughts. According to your education, beliefs, and background you may interpret these in any number of ways. For that matter, they may originate from several sources. On many occasions, however, you have inadvertently tuned in on one of your other streams of consciousness, opened momentarily a channel to those other levels of reality in which other portions of you dwell.

Some of these may involve the thoughts of what you would call a reincarnational self, focused in another period of history as you know it. You may instead, “pick up” an event in which a probable self is involved, according to your inclination, your psychic suppleness, your curiosity, your desire for knowledge. In other words, you may become aware of a far greater reality than you now know, use abilities that you do not realize you possess, know beyond all doubt that your own consciousness and identity is independent of the world in which you now focus your primary attention. If all of that were not true, I would not be writing this book and you would not be reading it.

Here the basic experience is hastily dressed up as much as possible in physical clothes. This is not because you want to understand the experience, but because you refuse to accept it as basically nonphysical. All dreams are not of this nature. Some dreams themselves do take place in psychic or mental areas connected with your daily activities, in which case no dressing-up process is necessary. But in the very deep reaches of sleep experience — those, incidentally, not yet touched upon by scientists in so-called dream laboratories — you are in communication with other portions of your own identity, and with the other realities in which they exist.

I do not want to minimize the importance of your state of consciousness; as, for example, you read this book. Presumably you are awake, but in many ways when you are awake, you are resting far more than you are in your so-called unconscious nightly state. Then to a larger extent you realize your own reality, and are free to use abilities that in the daytime you ignore or deny.

(10:26.) At a very simple level, for example, your consciousness leaves your body often in the sleep state. You communicate with people in other levels of reality that you have known, but far beyond this, you creatively maintain and revitalize your physical image. You process daily experience, project it into what you think of as the future, choose from an infinity of probable events those you will make physical, and begin the mental and psychic processes that will bring them into the world of substance.

At the same time, you make this information available to all these other portions of your identity, who dwell in entirely different realities, and you receive from them comparable information. You do not lose contact with your ordinary waking self. You simply do not focus upon it. You turn your attention away. In the daytime you simply reverse the process. If you were looking at your daily normal self from the other viewpoint, you see, using an analogy here, you might find that physically waking self as strange as you now find the sleeping self. The analogy will not hold however, simply because this sleeping self of yours is far more knowledgeable than the waking self of which you are so proud.

(10:35.) The seeming division is not arbitrary, or forced upon you. It is simply caused by your present stage of development, and it does vary. Many people take excursions into other realities — swim, so to speak, through other streams of consciousness as a part of their normal waking lives. Sometimes strange fish pop up in those waters!

Now I am obviously such a one in your terms, swimming up through other dimensions of reality and observing a dimension of existence that is yours rather than my own. There are, therefore, channels that exist between all these streams of consciousness, all these symbolic rivers of psychological and psychic experience, and there are journeys that can be made from my dimension as well as yours.

The ego does want to understand and interpret physical reality, and to relate to it. It wants to help you survive within physical existence, but by putting blinders upon it, you hamper its perception and native flexibility. Then because it is inflexible you say that this is the natural function and characteristic of the ego.

It cannot relate to a reality that you will not allow it to perceive. It can poorly help you to survive when you do not allow it to use its abilities to discover those true conditions in which it must manipulate. You put blinders upon it, and then say that it cannot see.

(Following his pattern of late, Seth wound up the session with a couple of pages of other material. This time the data concerned the reasons behind Jane’s years of training in writing poetry and fiction. It was very astute, I thought. Seth explained how Jane’s poetry had always been “a creative offshoot of her desire to understand the nature of existence and reality, her way of probing psychically… into other realms… a method of investigation and a method of exploring the results.”

(Her fiction, Seth added, was Jane’s “way of probing probabilities and of trying to understand other people. All of her [writing] is a part of her creative life, but now she is investigating the nature of reality far more directly…. There is a great unity in the personality’s main interests. Nothing will be left behind. The creative self is operating, you see — going exactly where it wants to go.”