“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: We will continue dictation.

Now: Your consciousness leaves the physical organism in various ways, according to the conditions. In some cases the organism itself is still able to function to some degree, although without the leadership or organization that existed previously. The simple consciousness of atoms, cells, and organs continues to exist, after the main consciousness has left, for some time.

There may or may not be disorientation on your part, according to your beliefs and development. Now I do not necessarily mean intellectual development. The intellect should go hand in hand with the emotions and intuitions, but if it pulls against these too strongly, difficulties can arise when the newly freed consciousness seizes upon its ideas about reality after death, rather than facing the particular reality in which it finds itself. It can deny feeling, in other words, and even attempt to argue itself out of its present independence from the body.

At this point many variations in behavior emerge, each the result of individual background, knowledge, and habit. The surroundings in which the dead find themselves will often vary. Vivid hallucinations may form experience quite as real as any in mortal life. Now, I have told you that thoughts and emotions form physical reality, and they form after-death experience. This does not mean that the experiences are not valid, any more than it means that physical life is not valid.

It does not do to say that such a river is illusion. The symbol is reality, you see. The way was planned. Now, that particular map is no longer generally in use. The living do not know how to read it. Christianity has believed in a heaven and a hell, a purgatory, and reckoning; and so, at death, to those who so believe in these symbols, another ceremony is enacted, and the guides take on the guises of those beloved figures of Christian saints and heroes.

(9:55.) I am speaking now of the events immediately following death, for there are other stages. Guides will helpfully become a part of your hallucinations, in order to help you out of them, but they must first of all get your trust.

At one time — in your terms — I myself acted as such a guide; as in a sleep state Ruburt now follows the same road. The situation is rather tricky from the guide’s viewpoint, for psychologically utmost discretion must be used. One man’s Moses, as I discovered, may not be another man’s Moses. I have served as a rather creditable Moses on several occasions — and once, though this is hard to believe, to an Arab.

A friend and I, with some others, staged the ceremony, and from opposite clouds in the sky Allah and I shouted out our claims upon his soul — while he, poor man, cowered on the ground between us. Now while I tell this story humorously, you must understand that the man’s belief brought it about, and so to set him free, we worked it through.

(10:20. Jane’s trance had been deep, although she recalled parts of Seth’s adventure. She said she had a series of images which paralleled the material, yet she couldn’t describe them now.

(The Crusades consisted of a series of military expeditions sent out by the Christian powers in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, to recover the Holy Land from the Moslems. While Seth was giving the data, Jane said, she wondered what an Arab would be doing in Turkish Constantinople in those days. I explained the geography of the region. Presumably, such a traveler could have reached Constantinople [now Istanbul], by an overland journey across Turkey, which lay north of the Arab lands, or by sailing the eastern Mediterranean around Turkey, through the Dardanelles and so into the city. Distances in the Middle East are comparatively short.

Now: To be such a guide requires great discipline and training.

They may, for example, become aware of their own reincarnational selves, recognizing quite readily personalities they knew in other lives, if those personalities are not otherwise engaged. They may deliberately now hallucinate, or they may “relive” certain portions of past lives if they choose. Then there is a period of self-examination, a rendering of accounts, so to speak, in which they are able to view their entire performance, their abilities and weak points and to decide whether or not they will return to physical existence.

Remember that in one way, your physical existence is the result of mass hallucination. Vast gulfs exist between one man’s reality and another’s. After death, experience has as much organization, highly intricate and involved, as you know now. You have your private hallucinations now, only you do not realize what they are. Such hallucinations as I have been speaking of, intense symbolistic encounters, can also occur in your sleep states, when the personality is at a time of great change, or when opposing ideas must be unified, or if one must give way to another. These are highly charged, significant psychological and psychic events, whether they happen before or after death.

(“All right.” Jane’s voice was now quite hoarse and weak; I believe she would have been forced to stop in a few more moments. This is one of the very few times, in seven years of sessions, that she has had any voice interference.

Now: We will shortly end the session.