“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

My instructions concerning projection should tell you a good deal about the true nature of the self.

All limitations, basically, are self-adopted. They may be necessary at one time or another, but they can never be primary realities. Limitations, in other words, are illusion. You have to deal with them only because you have created them. Your exterior circumstances are the materializations of inner climate.

There are no limits to the types of projections that can occur, basically speaking, for there are no limitations to the self, and a projection is an extension of the self. Your present existence is of course a projection. Activities based upon the framework of your present existence must be initiated within a system of chemicals and physical properties which make physical existence possible.

If life within the physical organism is to be maintained, then consciousness must return to it. This does not mean that consciousness is dependent upon the physical organism. There will be [an] endless series of projections in other existences, and these will have no chemical basis as you know it. Your traveling consciousness appears as an apparition within some other systems.

Your own thoughts have a reality that you do not understand, and their own kind of form, or psychic content, and this content exists not as pure energy, but as energy with form and shape. And when it is perceived by you, then it has bulk. The bulk is the result of your own perception. The bulk, or mass, is perceived whether or not the ideas have ever been materialized as physical matter. Whenever you come in contact with a particular idea form, and this will only happen in projections, then you will automatically perceive that form with bulk or mass.

Now. Projections further extend the self and the identity, only this time in realms where the physical self cannot follow. Now this kind of projection, this extension of identity, is the true nature and the creative aspect of aggression. This and not war, is the meaning of aggression. It is a forward thrust of creative activity, forever extending itself in this manner, and instantly changed, and no longer what it was.

Projection then is aggression. The self thrusts forward into new dimensions, and this is creative. Painting a picture is aggressive. You are thrusting energy into new forms. All this you see implies a destruction, but only in your limited terms. Each projection, for example, is the death, in one way, of the limited self that stood earlier.

Each painting that you create represents the death of the self that you were before you created it. The changing self forever dies in this manner, and yet only this symbolic death insures psychic survival. There is no basic moral problem then when you consider the true nature of aggression, for it is highly creative, and without destruction there would be no existence. These are two faces of the same coin.

A projection, an out-of-body experience, is a creative act, and again all creative acts are basically aggressive. Now, you change those dimensions in which your projections take place. You cannot visit them and leave no mark.

The ego, as a rule, is frightfully leery of such action, since to it an out-of-body experience always symbolizes physical death. At the same time the ego becomes more assured after successful projections, since it discovers itself not only intact but immeasurably enriched. Indeed, the ego both fights, fears and desires any creative act. Any creative act, including the production of any art, necessitates a momentary release from the ego, an escape from it, which the ego fears.

Yet again, the ego is enriched and therefore allows the self more freedom. Successful projections therefore will ultimately lead to more projections, and they will be more easily executed.

(Break at 9:40. As she had done during the 274th session, Jane remained in trance at break. This didn’t mean she confined herself to her chair, sitting with her eyes closed. Instead she too paced about the room, her eyes open and very dark, and spoke to me as I stretched. We discussed briefly the similarity between projections and my paintings. She lit a cigarette and said she’d let me tell her when I was ready to resume.

You can only do so much in your painting. You can only create it as a reality in so many dimensions. You cannot appreciate, for that matter, all the systems of reality in which the painting does have reality. This is a very simple analogy: However, in some aspects a projection to another system could be likened to a situation in which you entered the landscape of one of your own paintings.

Now in the realities of other systems another house, you see, could appear (smile) and another person could appear, and the projecting consciousness would be such a person. He must instantly adapt to the new surroundings.