“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause, one of many, at 9:37.) While operating through the body structures, consciousnesses such as your own focus largely upon the three-dimensional orientation. In out-of-body states, however, consciousness can travel faster than light — often, in fact, instantaneously.

(Pause at 10:10.) When consciousness leaves the body, therefore, it alters some of the coordinates. There are various questions involving the nature of perception that then occur, and these will be discussed somewhat later (but see Note 4). Consciousness is equipped to focus its main energy, in your terms at least, generally within the body, or to stray from it for varying amounts of time. Theoretically, your human consciousness can take many different roads while still maintaining its physical base. In far-past historical times, different kinds of orientation were experimented with (as by the “sleepwalkers” described in the last session, for instance). Your own present private experience can give hints and clues about such other cultures, for those abilities reside within the natural framework, now, but are underdeveloped.

(Long pause, eyes closed.) While you believe, for example, that technology as you understand it (underlined) alone means progress, and that progress necessarily requires overriding physical manipulation of the environment that must forever continue, you will judge past civilizations in that light. This will blind you to certain accomplishments and other orientations to such an extent that you will not be able to see evidence of achievement when it appears before your eyes.

(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.

I have said (as at 9:48) that the body can indeed carry on, performing necessary maintenance activities while the main consciousness is detached from it. To some extent it can even perform simple chores. (Pause.) In sleep, in fact, it is not at all necessary that the main consciousness be alert in the body. Only in certain kinds of civilizations, for that matter, is such a close body-and-main-consciousness relationship necessary. There are other situations, therefore, in which consciousness ordinarily strays much further, returning to the body as a home station and basis of operation, relying upon it for certain kinds of perception only, but not depending upon it for the entire picture of reality. Physical life alone does not necessarily require the kind of identification of self with flesh that is your own.

(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.

(Pause at 12:07. Seth’s comments were for Jane, and took up another page of notes. End at 12:19 A.M.