“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In the meantime, on Saturday morning, July 27, Jane received her first copy of The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book, from her publisher. She was delighted. So was I. The book’s physical appearance was most pleasing to us. As an artist, I’m very conscious of whether I think the “package” equals its contents, though since she is verbally oriented this is less important to Jane.

(Just as I had some small psychic adventures during our time off from “Unknown” Reality, Jane did too. One of hers that I’ll mention here is related to published material. During the night following the arrival of that first copy of Personal Reality, while lying quietly beside me in an altered state of consciousness, Jane received information of how “the ancients paralyzed the air.” It could then be walked upon and manipulated in various other ways. She woke me up to tell me about the experience, and to remind her to write an account of it the next day. She couldn’t identify its source, except to say that she hadn’t been dreaming. At the breakfast table, I told her I thought the material was connected to the sessions in Personal Reality on the interior sound, light, and electromagnetic values “around or from which” the physical image forms. Involved here also, I added, were certain ideas in her novel The Education of Oversoul Seven.²

Now, dictation: Consciousness operates with what you may call code (spelled) systems. These are beyond count. Consciousness differentiates itself, therefore, by operating within certain code systems that help direct particular kinds of focus, bringing in certain kinds of significances³ while blocking out other data.

All of the probabilities practically possible in human development are therefore present to some extent or another in each individual. Any biological or spiritual advancement that you might imagine will of course not come from any outside agency, but from within the heritage of consciousness made flesh. Generally, those alive in this century chose a particular kind of orientation. The species chose to specialize in certain kinds of physical manipulation, to devote its energies in certain directions. Those directions have brought forth a reality unique in its own fashion. Man has not driven himself down a blind alley, in other words. He has been studying the nature of his consciousness — using it as if it were apart from the rest of nature, and therefore seeing nature and the world in a particular light.⁶ That light has finally made him feel isolated, alone, and to some extent relatively powerless (intently).

(Rapidly:) He is learning how to use the light of his own consciousness, and discovering how far one particular method of using it can be counted upon. He is studying what he can do and not do with that particular focus. He is now discovering that he needs other lights also, in other words — that he has been relying upon only a small portion of an entire inner searchlight that can be used in many directions. Let us look at some of those other directions that are native to man’s consciousness, still waiting to be used effectively.

(Pause at 9:16.) There are cycles in which consciousness forms earthly experience, and maps out historical sequences. So there have been other species of mankind beside your own, each handling physical data in its own way. Some have taken other directions, therefore, than the one that you have chosen. Even those paths are latent or secondary, however, within your own private and mass experience. They reside within you, presenting you with alternate realities⁷ that you may or may not choose privately or en masse, as you prefer.

In your reality, your consciousness is usually identified with the body, on the other hand — that is, you think of your consciousness as being always within your flesh. Yet many individuals have found themselves outside of the body, fully conscious and aware (including Jane and me).

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.

Let us look for a moment at the body consciousness.

It is equipped, as an animal is, to perform beautifully in its environment. You would call it mindless, since it would seem not to reason. For the purpose of this discussion alone, imagine a body with a fully operating body consciousness, not diseased for any reason or defective by birth, but one without the overriding ego-directed consciousness that you have. There have been species of such a nature. In your terms they would seem to be like sleepwalkers, yet their physical abilities surpassed yours. They were indeed as agile as animals — nor were they unconscious.¹⁰ They simply dealt with a different kind of awareness.

In your terms they did not have [an overall] purpose, yet their purpose was simply to be. Their main points of consciousness were elsewhere, in another kind of reality, while their physical manifestations were separate. Their primary focuses of consciousness were scarcely aware of the bodies they had created. Yet even those bodies learned, in quotes now, “through experience,” and began to “awaken,” to become aware of themselves, to discover time, or to create it. Period.

(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.

Now the physical organism as such is capable of that kind of reality system. It is not better or worse than your own. It is simply alternate behavior, biologically and spiritually possible. No complicated physical transportation systems were set up. In the physical state, in what you would call the waking state, these individuals slept. To you, comparatively speaking, their waking activities would seem dreamlike, and yet they behaved with great natural physical grace, allowing the body to function to capacity. They did not saddle it with negative beliefs of disease or limitation. Such bodies did not age to the extent now, that yours do, and enjoyed the greatest ease and sense of belonging with the environment.

(10:24.) Consciousness connected with the flesh, then, has great leeway spiritually and biologically, and can focus itself in many ways with and through the flesh, beside your own particular orientation. There have been highly sophisticated, developed civilizations that would not be apparent to you because the main orientation was mental or psychic, while the physical race itself would seem to be highly undeveloped.

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.”

Again, your own consciousness triumphantly rides above those deaths that you do not recognize as such. In your chosen three-dimensional existence, however, and in those terms, your consciousness finally recognizes a death. From the outside it is nearly impossible to pinpoint that intersection of consciousness and the seeming separation from the body. There is a time when you, as a consciousness, decide that death will happen, when in your terms you no longer bridge the gap of minute deaths not accepted.

(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.

Some individuals find themselves with memories of other lives, which are other days to the soul. Such persons then become aware of a greater consciousness reaching over those gaps, and realize that earthly experience can contain [among other things] a knowledge of existence in more than one body. Inherently then consciousness, affiliated with the flesh, can indeed carry such comprehensions. The mind of man as you know it shows at least the potential ability for handling a kind of memory with which you are usually not acquainted. This means that even biologically the species is equipped to deal with different sequences of time, while still manipulating within one particular time scheme. This also implies a far greater psychological richness — quite possible, again, within corporal reality — in which many levels of relationships can be handled. Such inner knowledge is inherent in the cells, and in ordinary terms of evolution is quite possible as a “future” development.

The unknown reality: Much of that reality is unknown simply because your beliefs close you off from your own knowledge. The reaches of your own consciousness are not limited. Because you accept the idea of a straight-line movement of time, you cannot see before or after what you think of as your birth or death,* yet your greater consciousness is quite aware of such experience. Ideally it is possible not only to remember “past” lives, but to plan future ones now. In greater terms, all such lives happen at once. Your present neurological structure makes this seem impossible, yet your inner consciousness is not so impeded.

You can hold within your conscious attention far more data than you realize. You have hypnotized yourselves into believing that your awareness is highly limited.

Doing the exercise will simply acquaint your normal consciousness with the sense of its own flexibility. You will be exercising the invisible muscles of your consciousness as certainly as you might exercise your body with gymnastics.

To other portions of yourself you would seem to be a sleepwalker. Full creative participation in any moment, however, awakens you to your own potentials, and therefore allows you to experience a unity between your own consciousness and the comprehension of your physical cells. Those cells are as spiritual as your soul is.