“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

These code systems involve molecular constructions and light values,⁴ and in certain ways the light values are as precisely and effectively used as your alphabet is. For example, certain kinds of life obviously respond to spectrums with which you are not familiar — but beyond that there are electromagnetic ranges, or rather extensions of electromagnetic ranges, completely unknown to you, to which other life forms respond.

Under certain conditions, therefore, the body can maintain itself while the “main consciousness” is away from it. The body consciousness is quite able, then, to provide the overall equilibrium. At certain levels of the sleep state this does in fact happen. In sleepwalking the body is active, but the main consciousness is not “awake.” It is not manipulating the body. The main consciousness is elsewhere. Under such conditions the body can perform tasks and often maneuver with an amazing sense of balance. This finesse, again, hints at physical abilities not ordinarily used. The main consciousness, because of its beliefs, often hampers such manipulability in normal waking life.

(Pause.) The sleepwalkers, as we will call them, were not asleep to themselves, and would seem so only from your viewpoint. There were several such races of human beings. Their [overall] primary experience was outside of the body. The physical corporal existence was a secondary effect. To them the real was the dream life, which contained the highest stimuli, the most focused experience, the most maintained purpose, the most meaningful activity, and the most organized social and cultural behavior. Now this is the other side of your own experience, so to speak. Such races left the physical earth much as they found it. The main activity, then, involved consciousness apart from the body. In your terms, physical culture was rudimentary.

In some of their own private dreams, many of my readers will have discovered a reality quite as vivid as the normal one, and sometimes more so. These experiences can give you some vague hint of the kind of existence I am speaking of.¹¹ There are also physical apparatuses connected with the hibernation abilities of some animals that can give further clues as to the possible relationships of consciousness to the body. Under certain conditions, for example, consciousness can leave the corporal mechanism while it remains intact — functioning, but at a maintenance level. When optimum conditions return, then the consciousness reactivates the body. Such behavior is possible not only with the animals. In systems different from your own, there are realities in which physical organisms are activated after what would seem to you to be centuries of inactivity¹² — again, when the conditions are right. To some extent your own life-and-death cycles are simply another aspect of the hibernation principle as you understand it. Your own consciousness leaves the body almost in the same way that messages leap the nerve ends.¹³ The consciousness is not destroyed in the meantime.

Now in the case of an animal who hibernates, the body is in the same state. But in the greater hibernation of your own experience, the body as a whole becomes inoperable. The cells within you obviously die constantly. The body that you have now is not the one that you had 10 years ago; its physical composition has died completely many times since your birth, but, again, your consciousness bridges those gaps (with gestures). They could be accepted instead, in which case it would seem to you that you were, say, a reincarnated self at age 7 (intently), or 14 or 21. The particular sequence of your own awareness follows through, however. In basic terms the body dies often, and as surely as you think it dies but once in the death you recognize. On numerous occasions it physically breaks apart, but your consciousness rides beyond those “deaths.” You do not perceive them. The stuff of your body literally falls into the earth many times, as you think it does only at the “end of your life.”

(Pause at 10:43, during a strong delivery.) Here consciousness decides to leave the flesh, to accept an official¹⁴ death. You have already chosen a context however, and it seems that that context is inevitable. It appears, then, that the body will last so long and no longer. The fact remains that you have chosen the kind of consciousness that identifies with the flesh for a certain period of time. Other species of consciousness — of a different order entirely, and with a different rhythm of experience — would think of a life in your terms as a day, and have no trouble bridging that gap between apparent life, death, and new life.

Imagine vividly what you will do tomorrow, and in detail plan a probable day that will rise naturally from your present experience, behavior, and purposes. Follow through as you did with the first part of the exercise. (Pause.) That day’s reality is already anticipated by your cells. Your body has prepared for it, all of its functions precognitively projecting their own existences into it. Your “future” life exists in the same manner, and in your terms grows as much out of your present as tomorrow grows out of your today.

(In his material above, concerning Jane’s search for newer, larger frameworks of belief once she began to dispense with her old “comforting” ideas, Seth very lucidly dealt with certain aspects of the role she’s chosen for this life. However, I want to emphasize here the emotional terms of Jane’s search — and state that at times those qualities have been very difficult for her to contend with. To some degree I’ve been involved in many changes of belief also, but I’m a participator in the development of the Seth Material, not its originator; the pressures and challenges weren’t — aren’t — as demanding. [With a humor born out of many a struggle, however, I note that it isn’t easy to give up certain cherished old beliefs, even when they’re demonstrably wrong, they may fit the personality all too well…. ]