“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

From your ordinary point of view the traveling consciousness is off-focus, not locked into physical coordinates in the designated fashion. The so-called inner world can be at least theoretically explored, however, in just such a way. Consciousness “unlocks” itself for a while from its usual coordinates. When this happens the out-of-body traveler is not simply out of his or her corporal form. The person steps out of usual context. Even if an individual leaves the body and wanders about the room no more than a few feet away from where the body is located,³ there are alterations, dash — the relationship of consciousness to the room is different. The relationship of the individual to time and space has altered. Time out of the body is “free time” by your standards. You do not age, for example, although this effect varies according to certain principles. I will mention these later.⁴

To one extent or another, therefore, all of the potentials of the species are now latent within each individual. Often these spring to the surface through events that may seem bizarre. The “unknown” reality is unknown only because you have not looked for its aspects in yourself. You have been taught to pay almost exclusive attention to your exterior behavior. Privately, then, much of your inner life escapes you. You often structure your life according to that exterior pattern of events. These, while important, are the result of your own inner world of activity. That inner world is your only real connection with the exterior events, and the objective details make sense only because of the subjectivity that gave them birth.⁶

In the same way, when you look at the current state of the world, or at history, you often structure your perceptions so that only the topmost surfaces of events are seen. Using the same kind of reasoning, you are apt to judge the historic past of your species in very limited terms, and to overlook great dues in your history because they seem to make no sense.

(Well over a one-minute pause at 10:30, eyes closed.) Give us a moment … You have not worked with the power of thought or feeling, but only with its physical effects. Therefore, to you only physically materialized events are obvious. You do not accept your dreams as real, for example, but as a rule you consider them fantasies — imaginative happenings. Until very recently you generally believed that all information came to the body through the outer senses, and ignored all evidence to the contrary. It was impossible to imagine civilizations built upon data that were mentally received, consciously accepted, and creatively used.⁷ Under such circumstances scientists could hardly look for precognition in cells.⁸ They did not believe it existed to begin with.

Much of the remainder of “Unknown” Reality, then, will deal with an inside look at the nature of reality, and with some exercises that will allow you to see yourself and your world from another perspective. Later I intend to say far more about some civilizations that, in your terms, came before your own (but see the last sentence in Note 4). Before you can understand their orientation, we will have to speak about various alternate kinds of consciousness and out-of-body experience. These will help you to understand how other kinds of cultures could operate in ways so alien to your own.

This does not mean that an alienation results in those realities — simply a relationship in which the body and consciousness relate to other events. Only your beliefs, training, and neurological indoctrination prevent you from recognizing the true nature of your consciousness while you sleep. You close out those data. In that period, however, at an inner order of events, you are highly active and do much of the interior mental work that will later appear as physical experience.

This also has to do with pulsations of energy in which consciousness as you know it, now, exercises itself, using native abilities that cannot be expressed through physical orientation alone.

(With many pauses:) Give us a moment … Such a performance actually means that physical reality clicks off and on.¹¹ In your terms, it exists only in your waking hours. The inner work that makes it possible is largely done in the sleep state. The meeting of body consciousness and your main consciousness requires an intense focus, in which the greatest manipulations are necessary. Perceptions must be precise in physical terms. To some extent, however, that exquisite concentration means that certain limitations occur. Cellular comprehension is not tuned into by the normally conscious self, which is equally unaware of its own free-wheeling nature at “higher” levels. So a disengagement process must happen that allows each to regenerate. The consciousness then leaves the body. The body consciousness stays with it.

3. One of the most unique out-of-body experiences, or projections, I’ve had was much like that which Seth describes here. It took place in April 1971, and I wrote about it in Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks. See the notes for the 583rd session. My consciousness didn’t travel more than 10 feet from my body that time, but the little journey, so vivid and pleasant, did much to reinforce the enlarged view of reality that I’d gradually begun to adopt after Jane started delivering the Seth material late in 1963. I’ve never forgotten the sense of freedom that that modest projection engendered within me — and during it, my temporal relationships were different.

5. “Disentanglement” immediately reminded me of the inner senses — those qualities and abilities which the personality uses to apprehend its physical (or camouflage) world. Seth began describing the inner senses early in 1964. His “Disentanglement From Camouflage” happened to be number eight on a list of nine, although the order is unimportant. Jane devoted Chapter 19 of The Seth Material to the inner senses.

“With disentanglement,” Seth stated in the 43rd session, “the inner self disengages itself from one particular camouflage before it either adopts another set smoothly or dispenses with camouflage entirely. This is accomplished through what you might call a changing of frequencies or vibrations … In some ways, your dream world gives you a closer experience with basic inner reality than does your waking world, where the inner senses are so shielded from your awareness.”

A note: Just as he periodically reminds us of his material-to-come on physical aging and out-of-body states (see Note 4, above), Seth mentions that there are more inner senses he’ll tell us about someday — then adds that many of them are so far removed from reality as we understand it that our comprehension will be intellectual at best; in such cases we won’t be able to identify with them emotionally. And then other groups of inner senses, Seth continues, are truly “beyond verbalization.”

6. Much of the material in Appendix 12 (including the notes), deals with connections between our inner and outer worlds.