“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

First of all, it should be obvious from what I have said so far that there is no one after-death reality, but [that] each experience is different. Generally speaking, however, there are dimensions into which these individual experiences will fall. For example, there is an initial stage for those who are still focused strongly in physical reality, and for those who need a period of recuperation and rest. On this level there will be hospitals and rest homes. The patients do not yet realize that there is nothing wrong with them at all.

All of this occurs more or less at one level, though you must understand that I am simplifying the issues here to some extent. For example, some individuals do not undergo any such periods, but because of development and progress during their past lives, they are ready to begin more ambitious programs.

If you have been obsessed with a particular project, for example, you may try to complete it. There are always guides to help you understand your situation, but you may be so engrossed that you pay them no heed.

It is not common. But nevertheless, under various circumstances, such individuals will attempt to reactivate the physical mechanism, becoming more panicstricken when they discover the body’s condition. Some, for example, have wept over the corpse long after the mourners have left, not realizing that they themselves are completely whole — where, for example, the body may have been ill or the organs beyond repair.

If you wonder what Aunt Sally is doing in, say, Poughkeepsie, New York, then you will find yourself there. However, you cannot as a rule manipulate physical objects. You cannot pick up a lamp or throw a dish. This body is yours instantly, but it is not the only form that you will have. For that matter, this image is not a new one. It is interwound with your physical body now, but you do not perceive it. Following death, it will be the only body you are aware of for some time.

(Pause at 10:15.) Much later and on many levels you will finally learn to take many forms, as you choose, consciously. In one manner of speaking you do this now, you see, translating your psychological experience — your thoughts and emotions — quite literally but unconsciously into physical objects. You may find that when you imagine yourself as a child — after death — that you suddenly have the form of the child that you were. For a certain period of time, therefore, you can manipulate this form so that it takes any appearance that it had when it was connected with your physical form in the immediately previous physical life. You may die at eighty and after death think of the youth and vitality that you had at twenty, and find then that your form changes to correspond with this inner image.

It is the result of your own misinterpretations of the nature of reality. There is no one place therefore, no specific location. These environments exist unperceived by you amid the physical world that you know. Your perceptive mechanisms simply do not allow you to tune in to their ranges. You react to a highly specific but limited field. As I mentioned earlier, other realities coexist with your own at death, for example. You simply divest yourself of physical paraphernalia, tune into different fields, and react to other sets of assumptions.

As your perceptive mechanisms insist that objects are solid, for example, so they insist that such a thing as space exists. Now what your senses tell you about the nature of matter is entirely erroneous, and what they tell you about space is equally wrong — wrong in terms of basic reality, but quite in keeping of course with three-dimensional concepts. (Humorously): In out-of-body experiences from the living state, many of the problems are encountered, in terms of space, that will be met after death. And in such episodes, therefore, the true nature of time and space becomes more apparent. After death it does not take time to go through space, for example. Space does not exist in terms of distance. This is illusion. There are barriers, but they are mental or psychic barriers. For example, there are intensities of experience that are interpreted in your reality as distance in miles.

After death you may find yourself in a training center. Now theoretically, this center could be in the middle of your present living room, in physical space, but the distance between you and the members of your family still living — sitting perhaps, thinking of you or reading a paper — would have nothing to do with space as you know it. You would be more separated from them than if you were, say, on the moon.

(My original notes for this session included Seth’s long delivery in Jane’s ESP class last night, June 23, 1970. Seth dealt with organization in that session also — but organization within our own reality as well as in others. Since that session answers questions Jane and I are often asked, we’ve included it in the Appendix almost in its entirety.)