“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(2. My effect concerns an interference in my vision, without an actual loss of sight. It produced no aftereffects this evening, nor had it ever in earlier years beyond a very slight headache. Tonight I didn’t get the headache. Strangely I’ve never been alarmed by this phenomenon. With my somewhat secretive nature I’d had no urge, even as a child, to tell my parents about it, or to see a doctor. The absence of aftereffects, and the continued clarity of my mental processes, may have been reassuring.

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.

You are, as I said earlier, a spirit now; and that spirit has a consciousness. The consciousness belongs to the spirit then, but the two are not the same. The spirit may turn its consciousness off and on. By its nature consciousness may flicker and fluctuate, but the spirit does not.

We will be dealing now, after what I hope is suitable background material, with some chapters on the nature of existence after physical death, at the point of death, and involving the final physical death at the end of the reincarnational cycle. It was important that you understand something about the nature and behavior of your own consciousness before we could begin.