“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Alternate focus is merely a state in which you turn your consciousness in other than its habitual direction, in order to perceive quite legitimate realities that exist simultaneously with your own. You must alter your perception to perceive any reality that is not geared practically toward material form. This is something like looking out of the corner of your eye or mind, rather than straight ahead. (Pause.)

Using alternate focus, with practice it is possible to perceive the different physical formations that have filled any given area of space, or that will fill it in your terms. In some dream states you may visit a particular location and then perceive the location as it was, say, three centuries ago and five years hence, and never understand what the dream meant. It seems to you that space can be filled only by a given item at a time, that one must be removed to make room for another.

Instead you only perceive in this fashion. In alternate focus you can dispense with the root assumptions that usually guard, direct, and limit your perception. You are able to step aside from the moment as you know it, and return to it and find it there. Consciousness only pretends to bow to the idea of time. At other levels it enjoys playing with such concepts and perceiving great unity from events that occur outside of a time context — mixing, for example, events from various centuries, finding harmony and points of contact by examining both historical and private environments, plucking them out of the time framework.

It plays hopscotch in and out of reality. It is gone sometimes and you are not aware of it. On such occasions your attention is focused elsewhere, in what you might call mini-dreams or hallucinations, or associative and intuitive processes of thought that go quite beyond normal focus.

Normal waking consciousness weaves in and out of this infinite supportive webwork. Your inner experience is so intricate that verbally it is almost impossible to describe. Normal waking consciousness, while having memory of itself, obviously does not retain all memory all of the time. It is said that memory of past events drops back into the subconscious. It is still intensely alive, and by alive I mean living and active, although you do not focus upon it.

(10:55.) The fluctuations also follow seasonal changes. Events from any given layer of consciousness are reflected in all other areas, each being actualized according to the characteristics of the given layer. As one dream is like a stone thrown into the pool of dream consciousness, so any act appears in this pool also in its own guise. Alternate focus allows you to perceive the many manifestations of any given act, the true multidimensional reality of a given thought. It enriches the normal consciousness.