“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: We will resume dictation. (Pause.) Such other existences and realities as just described coexist with your own, and in the waking state you are not aware of them. Now, often in your dreams you are able to perceive such other situations, but you often wind them into dream paraphernalia of your own, in which case upon awakening you have little clear memory.

For various reasons, such a personality has not learned to assimilate its own experience. The characteristics of such apparitions follow those of a disturbed personality — with some exceptions, however. The whole consciousness is not present. The personality itself seems to be having a nightmare, or a series of recurring dreams, during which it returns to the physical environment. The personality itself is “safe and sound,” but certain portions of it work out unresolved problems, and discharge energy in such a fashion.

Now I am speaking generally. Again, there are exceptions where memory is retained, but as a rule ghosts and apparitions are not any more aware of their effect upon others than you are when you appear quite unconsciously as ghosts in worlds that would be quite strange to you.

(The combination of) thought, emotion, and desire creates form, possesses energy, (and) is made of energy. It will show itself in as many ways as possible. You only recognize the physical materializations, but as mentioned earlier in this book, you send pseudoforms of yourself out from yourself of which you are not aware; and this is completely aside from the existence of astral travel or projection, which is a much more complicated affair.

You appear in astral form in realities that are comparatively more advanced than your own. You are usually recognized because of your disorientation. You do not know how to manipulate. (Humorously): You do not know the customs. But whether you have a physical form or not, if you have emotions or feelings, these will take form. They have a reality. If you think strongly of an object, somewhere it will appear.

You ignore certain temperature variations and stirrings of air as imagination, that are instead indicative of such thought-forms. You thrust into the background telepathic communications that often accompany such forms, and you turn aside from all clues that other realities exist quite validly with your own, and that in the midst of one existence you are surrounded by intangible but valid evidence. The very words “life” and “death” serve to limit your understanding, to set up barriers where none intrinsically exist.

Some dead friends and relatives do visit you, projecting from their own level of reality into yours, but you cannot as a rule perceive their forms. They are not more ghostly, or “dead,” however, than you are when you project into their reality — as you do, from the sleep state.

As a rule, however, they can perceive you on those occasions. What you often forget is that such individuals are in various stages of development. Some have stronger connections to the physical system than others. The length of time an individual has been dead in your terms has little to do with whether or not you will be so visited, but rather the intensity of the relationship.

There are unlimited varieties of experience open to you after death, all possible, but some less probable than others, according to your development. Very generally now, there are three main areas, though exceptions and extraordinary cases can take other roads.

It is a place of commerce between systems, so to speak. Conditions and development are important, rather than the length an individual stays in this area. It is an intermediary step, but an important one. In your dreams you have been here.