“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We will resume dictation. (Pause; one of many.) Consciousness has many characteristics, some of course known to you. Many of the characteristics of consciousness, however, are not so apparent, since presently you largely use your own consciousness in such a way that its perceptions appear in quite other than “natural” guises. You are aware of your own consciousness, in other words, through the medium of your own physical mechanism. You are not nearly as aware of your own consciousness when it is not operating primarily through the mediumship of the body, as it does in out-of-body states and some dissociated conditions.

The characteristics of consciousness are the same (seme) whether you are in a body or outside of one. The peaks and valleys of consciousness that I mentioned exist to some degree in all consciousness despite the form adopted (adepted) after death (deth). The nature of your consciousness is no different basically (bascially) than it is now, though you may not be aware of many of its characteristics.

Since they do, of course, you can discover them now and learn to use them. This will directly (dreactly) assist you in after-death (agter) experience. You will not be nearly so startled by the nature of your own reactions (reactone) if you understand beforehand for example that your consciousness not only is not imprisoned by your physical body, but (bud) can create other portions at will. Those who “overidentify” their consciousness with their body can suffer self-created torment (tortment) for no reason, lingering about the body. Indeed, quite the forlorn soul, thinking it has no other place to go.

Earlier I said that you are only familiar with those characteristics of your own consciousness that you use through the mediumship of the body. You rely upon the body to express the perceptions of your consciousness. You tend, again, to identify the expression of your consciousness with the body.

Give us a moment. This was an exercise, actually, in the manipulation of consciousness. Close to death, this same sort of thing happens in varying degrees when the consciousness realizes that it can no longer express itself through the mediumship of the body. If the dying person overidentifies with the body then he can easily panic, thinking that all expression is therefore cut off, and for that matter that his consciousness is about to be extinguished.