“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To some extent this is natural. You are focused in a daily life for a reason. You have adopted it as a challenge. But within its framework you are also meant to grow and develop, and to extend the limits of your consciousness. It is very difficult to admit that you are in many ways more effective and creative in the sleep state than the waking state, and somewhat shattering to admit that the dream body can indeed fly, defying both time and space. It is much easier to pretend that all such experiences are symbolic and not literal, to evolve complicated psychological theories, for example, to explain flying dreams.

The simple fact is that when you dream you are flying, you often are. In the dream state you operate under the same conditions, more or less, that are native to a consciousness not focused in physical reality. Many of your experiences, therefore, are precisely those you may meet after death. You may speak with dead friends or relatives, revisit the past, greet old classmates, walk down streets that existed fifty years earlier in physical time, travel through space without taking any physical time to do so, be met by guides, be instructed, teach others, perform meaningful work, solve problems, hallucinate.

In physical life there is a lag between the conception of an idea and its physical construction. In dream reality, this is not so. Therefore, the best way to become acquainted with after-death reality ahead of time, so to speak, is to explore and understand the nature of your own dreaming self. Not very many people want to take the time or energy.

If you see evil all about you in physical life, and if it seems to outweigh the good, then you are not ready. You should not embark upon an exploration of these nightly adventures if you are depressed, for at this time your own psychic state is predisposed toward depressing experiences, whether awake or asleep. You should not embark upon such a study if you hope to substitute inner experience for physical experience.

You should be fairly competent and sympathetic. At the same time you should be outgoing enough in your physical environment so that you are capable of handling your life as it is. You need all your resources. This is to be an active exploration and endeavor, not a passive withdrawal, and certainly not a cowardly retreat. Toward the end of this book, methods will be given for those who are interested so that you can explore these after-death conditions consciously, having some control over your experiences and progress.

(10:54.) Your experience, in other words, follows your expectations. Now the same applies to after-death experience and to the dream experience, and to any out-of-body encounters. If you are obsessed with the idea of evil, then you will meet evil conditions. If you believe in devils, then you will encounter these. As I mentioned earlier, there is greater freedom when consciousness is not physically directed. Thoughts and emotions are constructed, again, into reality without the physical time lapse. So if you believe you will be met by a demon, you will create your own thought-form of one, not realizing that it is of your own creation.