“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane faced the painting as she sat in her Kennedy rocker, but my back was to it because of my position on the couch. During the several times I turned to look at it I noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Jane told me that Joseph, representing my own entity, smiled broadly at her in a way the painting actually doesn’t. The expression in the eyes changed first, the smile spreading from them down to the mouth. The forehead didn’t move. It was as though the painting became abruptly alive, although the painted head of Ruburt did not change.

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.

In our demonstration, to which of course Joseph gave his permission, he allowed his consciousness to retreat, and to some degree began to cut off its physical expression. He was not aware consciously of his permission, simply because this kind of demonstration could not be held if the normal waking consciousness knew. It would automatically be frightened. As I spoke about the dimming of consciousness, Joseph then experienced it.

(10:55. This may be a tricky point, and it may not. Seth used the word “dimming.” Certainly some of my abilities for physical expression had withdrawn considerably, yet I had remained clearheaded and alert, and, out of habit, thoroughly occupied with trying to use them…. Nor had I become aware of any kind of heightened consciousness, or sudden telepathic or clairvoyant powers.

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.

Such a belief in extinction, such a certainty that identity is about to be blotted out in the next moment, is a severe psychological experience, that in itself can bring about unfortunate reactions. What happens instead is that you find consciousness quite intact, and its expression far less limited than it was before. Joseph chose subconsciously to interrupt those methods of expression he was using at the time simply so that their interference would claim due notice.