“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

Dictation: We will be discussing alternate methods of orientation that consciousness can take when allied with flesh, trying to give the reader some personal experience with such altered conditions, along with a brief history of some civilizations that utilized these unofficial orientations as their predominant method of focus.

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.