“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

They are taught, in other words, the methods that allow them to translate emotion and thought into physical actuality. There is no time lag, as there must be in the three-dimensional system, between the initiation of such thoughts and their materialization.

When consciousness leaves the body and is away for some time then the connection is, of course, broken. In out-of-body states the connection still holds. Now it is possible for an individual who has died to completely misinterpret the experience and attempt to reenter the corpse. This can happen when the personality identified himself almost exclusively with the physical image.

(10:07.) All of these circumstances then may or may not occur according to the individual involved. However, after leaving the physical body, you will immediately find yourself in another. This is the same kind of form in which you travel in out-of-body projections, and again let me remind my readers that each of them leaves the body for some time each night during sleep.

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.

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.