“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.)

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.

Now: As mentioned somewhat earlier in this book, while your normal waking consciousness seems continual to you, and you are aware usually of no blank spots, nevertheless it has great fluctuations. To a large extent it has memory only of itself and its own perceptions. In normal consciousness, then, it seems as if there are no real other kinds of consciousness, no other areas or levels. When it encounters “blank spots” and “returns,” it blots out awareness that the moment of nonfunction occurred.

At various times many people do catch themselves, the experience being so vivid that it leaps the gap, so to speak, with perception so intense that even normal waking consciousness is made aware of it. These intervals are quite necessary to physical consciousness. They are woven through the fabric of your awareness so cleverly and so intimately that they color your psychic and feeling atmosphere. (Pause.)

(Pause at 10:23.) In periods of conscious “blank spots” or certain fluctuations, these memory systems are often perceived. As a rule the conscious mind with its own memory system will not accept them. When a personality realizes that such other realities exist and that other experiences with consciousness are possible, then he activates certain potentials within himself. These alter electromagnetic connections both within the mind, the brain, and even the perceptive mechanisms. They bring together reservoirs of energy and set up pathways of activity, allowing the conscious mind to increase its degree of sensitivity to such data. The conscious mind is set free of itself. To a large measure it undergoes a metamorphosis, taking on greater functions. It is able to perceive, little by little, some of the content before closed to it. It need no longer perceive the momentary “blank spots” fearfully, as evidence of nonexistence.